VFX Supervisors of Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, Nimona and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Talk About Layered Images To Create New Animation Styles

The first Oscar for best animated film was awarded in 2002 by DreamWorks ShrekThe animation industry has made incredible progress. This awards season, films like these are pushing the boundaries of what animation can be, and VFX plays a huge role in bringing new artistic styles to each picture.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse pushed the animated comic style of the 2018 film even further with six new, distinct worlds and a visually complex villain. Nimona Forgo depth of field and instead use “depth of detail” to give his medieval future a new graphical quality. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Chaos Incorporate 2D elements into a 3D space to counteract the heavy CG look.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wowed everyone in 2018 with its take on animated comics and set the bar high for what animation can look like. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse exceeds expectations by introducing six new worlds, each with a new animation style. While all were challenging in their own way, VFX Supervisor Mike Lasker says the new villain, The Spot, was the most challenging aspect of the film.

“It was the culmination of every tool in our toolbox that we created during production,” he says. “We had a lot of great reference paintings of him, and there were all these different, dark and nasty kinds of purple and ink coming off him as he moved his limbs.” Lasker’s team was able to add hand-drawn inlines, brushstrokes, distortions and more to create the final look. “We ended up using the line system, with ink splashes coming from the layers, heavy compositions, lighting, paint strokes – every part of the pipeline was involved.”

According to Lasker, appearance supervisor Craig Feifarek was instrumental in designing the venue’s final look. “Craig actually lit and composed all these shots,” he says. “He did a great job, but the animation department also did a great job of prototyping how the dot behaves in the final shots of the film. They were able to create all these crazy Flash frames… When I look at it now, I’m still in awe of what they did.”

Before Lasker and her team created the place, they set themselves the challenge of creating all universes, of which Gwen’s world was the most difficult. “It was the first one we developed,” he says, “and very early on they gave us the watercolor reference.” Since they wanted an ever-changing world with a watercolor aesthetic, some scenes in this universe would be more graphic, others would fall into white space, and others would become abstract as the camera moved further away.

“Before we started cleaning, we adjusted all the colors,” says Lasker. “They have a lot of graphic elements, a lot of specific colors, so we blocked them out and went back with our brush tools.” Most of the tools used Spider-verse There were new tools for production, including the line system, which was the main brush tool for watercolor, as well as the atmospheric brushstrokes used for spotting. “We wanted the watercolor to feel natural, like it was painted by hand, so we had a lot of different techniques that could all be combined and contribute to the final look.”

Nimona

In adapting ND Stephenson’s 2015 graphic novel, a lot of time was spent finding the right look for the high-tech medieval world, according to VFX supervisor Archie Donato. “The difficulty from the beginning was this mix of historic architecture and a super-modern Tokyo style,” he says. “We spent a lot of time trying to convey the feeling of a big city without losing the medieval part of it.” To this end, medieval renderings of skyscrapers and moving images were added in certain places.

To maintain a graphical style, the traditional depth of field used in animations won’t work, as it makes objects further away from the camera look softer and makes your eyes feel like you can’t see details. “Instead of depth of field, we coined the term ‘depth of detail,'” says Donato. “Since this film is based on a graphic novel, we wanted to preserve this area, so we started to lose detail the further we moved away from the camera.” This causes geometry and detail to disappear, but the shapes on the screen retain a sharper graphic quality Quality. “At some point the billboards, the buildings, the windows, etc. become smaller squares and boxes in the distance.”

Towards the end of the film, a huge creature made of smoke and dark matter attacks the city, which was a difficult challenge in CG. “The creatives’ brief was that this creature would be made entirely of smoky dark matter and have no fixed physical boundaries,” says Donato. First, the team built a simple geometric rendering of the creature and added the effects. “The difficulty is that when you do a shot like this and you want the rocket to hit the character, it’s much easier if you give the character clear boundaries.” If the rocket hits the creature, the explosion cannot occur. body, because narratively speaking the body does not consist of a fixed mass.

The solution was compositing, that is, the combination of several digital elements into one image. “We had to break it up into various elements by merging the creature’s smoke ribbons into different missile trails or blast focal points,” says Donato. Composing the image like this was a complex process, but it ensured that the effects maintained a stylized look that blended seamlessly with the essence. “Once we got the system up and running, it was applied to virtually every survey.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Chaos

For Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant ChaosThe filmmakers wanted to focus on the youthful aspect of the characters, both in terms of story and artistic style. Mikros Animation was the lead animation studio for the film and VFX supervisor Matthieu Rouxel began working with director Jeff Rowe to develop a unique style. “From the beginning, Jeff had big ambitions for the visual design of the film,” says Rouxel. “One of the first references we had was a sheet of drawings made by real teenagers. They were cool, not super artistic, master drawings, and that was the spirit they were going for. In addition to these drawings, Rouxel says there were also more sophisticated references, such as the use of light and color in Alex Webb’s photography of New York City. “For me, it was a mix of those two things that makes this film really unique.”

Although 2D elements play a large role in the film’s artistic style, CG was still crucial to the animation. “I’ve been working on CG films for years and have always tried to break through that nice, clean 3D aspect and recreate the atmosphere of something more 2D driven and artistic.” Rouxel says that about 95 percent of the film in Shot in 3D, even the pencil lines that create shadows and details, were created in CG as part of the design of each character, even though they look two-dimensional.

There was no easy solution to breaking the strictly CG look, as Rowe didn’t want the stylization to come through a final filter in the film. “There are a few things you try from the beginning,” says Rouxel. “First, you create asymmetry in the models: the eyes are not the same size, the shoulders are not the same, the cheeks are different.” In addition to the asymmetry, they created the models with a texture similar to clay, creating curved lines with the thickness of a real pencil to give the feeling of 2D art.

Another strategy was to prohibit the use of real textures, which meant that the team creating textures for each item had to start from scratch. “Then the lighting would be applied normally, but there were many functions in the shadow.” The shadow will be used individually for each light source to give the impression of painted lights and shadows. “The compositors also created their own material to overlay a texture over the photo and blend it with the texture projected in 3D, so it’s not just smooth and clean.”