The VFX of I Am Legend: Article on the work Sony Pictures Imageworks

[RobertoOrtiz]

And here is ANOTHER article by VFXworld
http://www.vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=319b255d&atype=articles&id=3487

[MartyMcFly]

"highlighting Imageworks' ability to create digital characters that can seamlessly integrate with live action characters and are able to hold their own in the center of a scene."

Seeing this movie recently, I would have to disagree with this quote from the article.
I enjoyed the film. I wouldn't see it again,..but I thought it was generally done well.

The hardest part of this film to get past for me was the "dark seekers". They were obviously CG, and I believe that it really took away from the film. If the style drew closer to that of 28 days later, where real people were used, I believe the movie would have been much scarier and believable. For the parts that had to be "amped up",...then I understand using a cg double.

The City effects I thought were done very well though. Nice work on that.

Just my 2 cents on the dark seekers. Anybody else?

[SergioSantos]

great articles!

[aglick]

"...Destroying the creatures’ skin, though, depended on new lighting and rendering techniques. In the film whenever the Infected were hit with bright light, their skin bubbles and boils, smokes and smolders, and emits smoke and steam, “We had techniques for doing that with one or two characters, but we had to apply these effects to more than 40 characters at a time.” says Berney

To make this possible, the crew first lit the characters and then moved the illumination data into a point cloud file that Houdini read as particles. Because the particles accumulated light during the course of the animation, the lighters could, in effect, burn the skin by shining light on it. And, they could emit smoke from the burned areas..."


Now that is just cool as hell.


"...The shader writers devised a solution using bones to control translucency – the closer a bone was to the surface, the less light would transmit into the surface. Texture maps provided additional control over the amount of light transmitted beneath the surface of the creatures’ bodies. And in addition, pre-baking the illumination rather than rendering shadows from a point in space, allowed the lighters to use more sophisticated subsurface calculations for the light moving through the surface, which helped create softer transitions between light and dark..."


i wish I had thought of that (or was smart enough to figure out how to write the code to do it.)

[aglick]

"..Just my 2 cents on the dark seekers. Anybody else?"


I actually like the fact that the movement of the dark seekers was so violent and agressive. It fit the "infected " chraterisation of the dark seekers and it completely creeped me out... There's no way actors alone could have produced such realistic, exagerated movement. I guess you could always speed-up live action chroma-key footage, but even that always feels jittery and un-natural to me -

The physique and intertia of the creatures seemed visually acurate in a way that i don't know you can get with sped-up live action. I think mocap-to-synthactor with hand-tweaked keyframes was the right call.

I really liked the VFX and the film.

[kiaran]

Definitely a great movie. The only VFX which bothered me were the deer. They were too agile and fluid in their movements.

But apart from that, I was riveted to my seat the whole time. The Dark Seekers were a nice take on the zombie/vampire theme.

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