Awards

  • VES Nominated

    Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal Feature

  • AEAF Honour - Special Merit

    Characteristic Film VFX

'It was really exciting to tackle the final act of a massive show like Thor: Ragnarok, and show that Framestore can ascent to the challenge.'

Alexis Wajsbrot - VFX Supervisor

Edifice Asgard

Upgrading assets built for Thor: The Dark World, the team constructed an entirely CG Asgard environment containing over ix,000 buildings, mostly laid out by hand. 'Our surroundings artists pretty much built up Asgard from concept', says Ben Loch, CG Supervisor. 'Nosotros used our Butchery layout tool, in parallel with our proprietary instancing tool, frInstancer.' The team sculpted mountains based on references of the Norwegian Lofoten Islands, and refined the near distant panoramas as digital matte paintings.

The Incredible Blob

Framestore was granted the incredible opportunity to work with the Hulk for the first time. 'The whole team was incredibly motivated to get to the best possible Blob', says Alexis Wajsbrot, VFX Supervisor. The team used its proprietary 'Flex and Flesh' muscle and skin sliding tools for the task. 'The behaviour of the muscles was physically based', adds Harry Bardak, CG Supervisor. 'We had a collision system betwixt muscles, then the skin colliding with the muscles which created pocket-sized wrinkles.' Built into Framestore'due south Hulk rig was a new multi-subsurface system that scattered light through skin, muscle and bones.

Animators brought Blob to life through keyframe blitheness. For Hulk'due south facial performance, the artists used the blend shapes supplied from past films, enhanced by dynamic simulations. A collaboration with Curiosity's 'Blob specialist', concept creative person Ryan Meinerding, helped to inform the subtleties of his facial expressions. 'Nosotros actually redesigned our shot-sculpt pipeline in order to have maximum control and to be able to be very reactive to this feedback', adds Wajsbrot.

Korg

Taika Waititi's comedic turn equally Korg required the team to devise a CG stone-monster, capable of witty dialogue and performance. Made up of thousands of individual rocks, a complex standoff and deformation rig that supported a constantly-moving rock mosaic was constructed. 'Nosotros could button the nugget to evangelize different types of performance, and still get a realistic experience in how the rocks fit together', says Kyle McCulloch, VFX Supervisor. 'Subsequently the rig did its work, a team of artists went in and really polished how the rocks moved.' Nowhere was the rig's articulation more critical than in the face. Smaller stones were arranged around Korg's eyes and oral cavity, allowing the grapheme to speak and express subtle emotion.

Hulk vs. Fenris

At 23 feet alpine, Fenris, Hela'southward behemothic wolf side-kick, dwarfs fifty-fifty Hulk. The animation team used low photographic camera angles and tight framing to communicate the wolf'southward immense size. Groomers covered Fenris with around 12million hairs, which get wet when the ii characters crash into the water at the edge of Asgard, in a boxing of the giants. 'Some of our best animators focused on the posing of both Hulk and Fenris to get the strongest positioning, and we put forrard a lot of different options to Taika', says Wajsbrot. 'We fifty-fifty proposed some new shots - one close-up of Hulk fighting Fenris in the water made the cutting!'

Having close-up shots of the rapid h2o, and giant CG creatures splashing around in information technology, made it difficult to maintain clarity for audiences to follow the activeness but still experience similar natural h2o simulation. 'The offset simulations were obscuring our heroes, so it was all near finding the right balance between making the water sim large just still showing the performances', adds Wajsbrot. 'We did push the limit of both our internal h2o solver flush and our rendering engine Arnold to get the best water sim. Nosotros completely rethought how we were mixing spray and cream with the meshed h2o, using some aeration passes to create white h2o for meliorate integration.' Underwater shots included drops of the injured Hulk's claret; a special consultation with Marvel determined that this should be green.

Mega Surtur

Towards the end of the sequence a super-sized Surtur, the 'Titan of Fire', appears to add even more anarchy to the epic finale. Heavily augmented with fire and lava furnishings simulations, Surtur'southward biggy growth spurt elevates him to a height thousands of feet over Asgard. 'From the start, Taika felt quite strongly that even though Surtur was planet-sized, he shouldn't appear to move slowly', explains McCulloch.

The animation team worked on different variations of performances, working to find exactly the right residue of threat, speed, and calibration. They looked at sword fighters, wrestlers, and bodybuilders for inspiration on the shapes and poses to use on Surtur, e'er keeping in listen his new-found strength and power.

'The brief for Surtur included references to the surface of the sun, plasma, lava, and fire', adds McCulloch. 'The LookDev squad spent months partnering with our shader writers, experimenting with a myriad of ways to have something feel huge, somewhat transparent and refractive, while all the same seeing a visual complexity and surface.' The FX squad then built a fire simulation system that could wrap and ascertain Surtur'south trunk, perform inside the space effectually him, and take the visual scale of particular required to sell how large they were.

'Our digidouble work has been pushed to the betoken where information technology'southward actually really difficult to know when we're using the plate or a CG digidouble.'

Alexis Wajsbrot - VFX Supervisor

Digital Doubles

Equally Hela gains the upper hand over Thor, the God of Thunder fights dorsum with newly awakened powers that permit him to shoot bolts of lightning from his body. The squad modelled, groomed and shaded a very high-res version of Chris Hemsworth that could work both close-up and far away; also working on a muscle rig specially for the artillery, and a Animate being FX rig for cape and costume. 'Nosotros trunk-tracked Chris, even though it was going to be mainly CG, as we wanted to go on his confront and facial expressions. Regarding the lighting bolts themselves, we used Tesla coil references for the motion, and a Houdini setup in which we were able to fine art-direct the density and the speed of the bolts on him' says Wajsbrot.

The team also created a loftier-res digi double for Cate Blanchett'due south Hela, the Goddess of Death, who wore a mocap suit; this had to replaced with a digital version of her costume and a CG headdress. 'Her arrange had to have impact, and show her as "otherworldly"', says McCulloch. 'We used a lot of reference from the original comics for its wait development, and information technology was a process of discovery with the client to piece of work out how to give the headdress a pose and level of functioning that complemented her motivation.'

Alongside these larger-than-life characters, Framestore too modelled the Commodore and Statesman space ships; conjured hundreds of enemy D-Guards to battle our heroes; and if that wasn't enough, finished with a fire-fuelled devastation of the Asgard environment, in all contributing to 459 unforgettable shots.

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