The dramatic school bus fight in ‘In the Lost Lands’. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine. In The Lost Lands is full of many spectacular set pieces. Here, the team from Herne Hill break down the designs for The Rift, and also that tense moment where the characters must cross the cable car across the gorge. Mark O. Hammond (visual effects supervisor): The Rift is a brutal environment of a city that has been split in half by centuries of earthquakes. This environment was originally built in Unreal Engine for previs and used on set for the backgrounds. We reworked it afterwards in the traditional pipeline for some shots, but both assets are used in the final film. David Roby (CG supervisor): For The Rift’s design influences, in addition to the obvious urban destruction, Paul wanted to include some focal points of Art Deco architecture to help keep the geography legible. This primarily took shape in The Rift train station and the skyscraper that breaks the bus-cable-car’s fall. We also looked at a bunch of reference of geothermal vents to help get the feel right for the large emissions of noxious gases from the bottom of The Rift. In terms of construction, we used some hand layout for areas where we needed more precise, art-directed control such as near the seam-up with set or near action, as well as procedural workflows for volume. The linchpin of the procedural stuff was a really amazing city generator that CG supervisor Ben King got working for The Rift. You could paint, to camera, where you wanted roads, low-rise areas, etc. for a pleasing composition, and then cook out several point clouds which fed into the main environment. Mark O. Hammond (visual effects supervisor): For the cable-car scene, the live-action portion was filmed on a custom-built rotating platform for the bus. Mo-Sys rigged up a node that allowed us to track the speed of the rotation of the platform. This allowed us to solve for the camera’s rotation on set. Milla and the stunt performers handled the fight on top of the bus, which we then enhanced with digital doubles for more dangerous moves and to help with continuity. David Roby (CG supervisor): The biggest artistic challenge was to make sure that we felt the motion of the bus across the gorge during the fight. To make sure the bus felt like it was moving through space we made sure our gas plumes passed close enough to the bus to really feel the parallax as well as introducing a slight shift to the photographed elements in frame as if suspended from the cables above. Then there was the bus’ fall which we worked on to keep the speed and weight of both the bus and its cables feeling plausible within the movie’s vibe. From a technical side, the cable unwinding as it breaks was an interesting challenge. Allowing the sim to twist on itself in a way that still felt metallic was a delicate balance to find. In addition, the sequence had a fair number of relatively hero digidoubles for the monks. We had to add some to make sure the number they leave the station with feels plausible as they keep climbing out of the woodwork to fight. The post Across The Rift appeared first on befores & afters.