Plus, how key characters like the evil Malgosha and the wolf Dennis were made. When Wētā FX began venturing into A Minecraft Movie with director Jared Hess, one immediate challenge the studio faced was how to realize the ‘blocky’ style of the Minecraft world, from the video game the film is based on.  “We knew right from the get-go that it wasn’t necessarily something we could approach as traditional matte painting,” identifies Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Sheldon Stopsack, who worked with production visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon on the film. “We couldn’t paint our way out of it for the extended vistas and scopes of the Overworld and the Nether. We knew we had to build this world from the ground up, from front to back in every single aspect and detail. Our models team came up with a prototype and idea fairly early on, which ended up being called the ‘Blockz’ tool.” The Blockz tool allowed artists to block out broad, and sometimes intricate, shapes with basic geometry. “What the models team then did was turn a watertight mesh into a closed volume, which became a point cloud, effectively,” explains Stopsack. “We then utilized this point cloud to instance individual blocks from our inventory to create a blockified version of the input geometry. The idea was to be able to utilize different block types and materials that are created just like in the game. And then, we assembled them. The tool gave us a lot of control about different scales and material propagation. We could even introduce an amount of jitter so that there was a little bit of imperfection. That all played a role in the sense of figuring out how stylized and how true to the game we wanted to go.” The next challenge was how accurately to represent landscapes inside the world with blocks themselves (as they are in the game). “We wanted to honor the game very much so we looked at, what if we build everything with a true-to-the-game block size, which might be a meter high each?” recalls Stopsack. “But, if you do something like that and then you build, say for the Overworld environment, a mountain in the background, which we called Mount Minecraft, it would be six kilometers high. So, if you were to build it true to the scale of the blocks in the game, you wouldn’t even see a block anymore. It’s so tall, it would basically be a subpixel blur and your block size wouldn’t necessarily work anymore.” For this reason, the studio decided not to represent assets in those exact block sizes, but instead play with different scales. It still resulted in something like Mount Minecraft being 3,434,127 individual cubes (ie. around 20 million faces), but with the ability to art direct the look a little more. “In the end,” says Stopsack, “we would bake the asset down and then we created a new hero holistic asset from that which we then could treat a little bit more organically with more textures and treat them so that they were not just replicas of each other. It was an ongoing journey to find the right balance of blockiness and stylization, yet also obeying some realism. We also had to combine this with live-action photography, so there was no escape.” How much ‘blockiness’ to go with was also a consideration for the characters that Wētā FX developed, such as Dennis the wolf. “He was a struggle to get right,” notes Wētā FX animation supervisor Kevin Estey, referring to translation of the wolf from a blocky character in the game to the film. “Every time we tried to round anything off like his smile or the corners of his eyes or anything like that, if you went a little bit too round, it almost got a bit uncanny in a weird way. It took a while to finally crack the code and understand that we had to stick to the squarish aesthetic with harder corners in the eyes and harder corners in the mouth.” A blockiness style applied to the animation as well, to some degree, advises Estey. “We did approach everything with the understanding that it needed to sit in reality with live-action characters, which meant we couldn’t go so stylized that we ended up doing, say, step animation or anything like that. But we did have freedom to explore different things that might not always work with standard visual effects in a live-action film.” This related further to facial animation in terms of the face shapes that Wētā FX built for Dennis. “I remember that was a big moment that we were in the middle of the shoot with the production team and we were still trying to figure out how to make Dennis not look kind of freaky,” shares Estey. “When we realized that the mouth shapes had to maintain the corners that we build into the facial animation, that was a big moment for understanding that the squarishness and the blockiness needed to travel through into the motion as well.” Making Malgosha Another standout character for Wētā FX was the Piglin ruler of the Nether, Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House). The studio referenced Mama Fratelli from The Goonies, Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars and the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal in their designs for Malgosha.  “She is so unique in having a super squared-off fridge-sized hunchback,” says Stopsack, who observes that bringing that kind of look to life was a tough task. “Her appearance was almost 90 percent cloak. The cloak played a pretty pivotal role. We were fortunate enough that the production’s costume department actually built a super-elaborate 35 kilogram heavy cloak for on-set reference. It was so heavy, it wasn’t practical to use for any sort of proxy actor to actively wear on camera, but it was good reference.” Wētā FX also engaged with creature performer Allan Henry, standing in for Malgosha on set. After principal photography, Henry was part of a motion capture shoot at the visual effects studio’s mocap stage that further aided in finding the character.  “Malgosha’s hunchback was something that spoke a lot to what her gait would be and how she’d carry herself,” describes Estey. “Allan was great in figuring out how to make her walk with a bit of a limp, even to the point where he would favor a certain side of his body. We always tried to make sure that the staff was on a certain side that was helping the limp. He would always carry in his other hand—we just called it the chicken claw. And so, that became something that was very synonymous with Malgosha’s character and it was fun because she kept hooking her finger inside the cloak. It was all those pieces of input that helped with our exploration of how you make this giant, hulking refrigerator with gangly limbs move in a realistic way, as well as Rachel’s input.” One particular sequence in the third act battle sees Malgosha, near defeat, try to convince Jeff to step closer to her so she can stab him with a series of concealed blades. Each attempt becomes more humorous than the last. “I remember laughing so loud on set when this was actually played out with Jack and Allan,” notes Stopsack. “It was absolutely hilarious.” “Yes, the entire crew of 100 people had to just hold their mouths, and then, as soon as they called cut, people would burst out into laughter,” recalls Estey. “Allan and Jack came up with the final line. Jack’s character throughout the film is always saying ‘sneak attack’ and they thought it would be funny if Malgosha also says it at the end when she does her final blade throw in the most useless and weak way. And that’s the thing that just had people absolutely rolling.” Estey mentions that, in addition to the hilarity of that moment on screen, Wētā FX was actually also able to craft some background action with some Piglins holding censers that played further into the slightly absurd nature surrounding the character. “This really speaks to the free-flowing nature of the production. We had a two week mocap shoot here at Wētā, and Jared came up to me and the stage manager and said, ‘I’ve got this really stupid idea, could we get two little Piglins that have censers with incense. I just think it’d be funny if they’re always next to Malgosha, no matter what.’ So, we mocked something up. And on set, we just started calling them ‘Priestie boys’ and then that became their name, internally.” The wackiness surrounding Malgosha did not stop there. At one point, she stabs a little Piglin who has made a drawing of an idealized house and garden. It turns the Piglin immediately into a pork steak. “Originally,” states Estey, “what was meant to happen was that she smacks the Piglin away and it’s meant to fall back and off-screen. We did a few like that on the mocap stage, but then I think Jared said, ‘What if we stabbed the Piglin?’ I’m like, ‘Can we do that? Is this a PG movie?’ Then I thought, ‘Well, what if the Piglin just turns into a pork chop on the end of the knife?’ So that’s what we did. I love that it made it because I thought, ‘I don’t know, stab a kid?’” The drawing the Piglin shows Malgosha just happened to be one made by a daughter of Stopsack, as he recounts. “We knew we had this drawing to do, so we encouraged kids to do some artwork. We actually called it, ‘We Need a Terrible Drawing.’ Not exactly an incentive to the child—’Hey, can you provide me with a terrible drawing?’ But, we had this art competition and all these kids of our co-workers did them. The original drawing was Malgosha and the Piglin holding hands, very cute, but Jared discarded the idea for a little while. Then it was back in, and I tasked my kids with, ‘Hey, can you give us a terrible drawing of a Minecraft house?’ So yet again, they went back to the drawing board and both of them chimed in and put their best foot forward, and we submitted it to Jared for review.” “And then, ultimately, he made a pick, but the pick didn’t go through without a note! I had to break the news to my daughter that she had to address the note. So she gave us another revision and we made another submission with that note addressed, and we submitted it to Jared and it got finally approved, which was great.” Crafting more characters In addition to Malgosha and Dennis, Wētā FX was responsible for designing a range of others featured in the film. These were also shared with the show’s other VFX vendors including Sony Pictures Imageworks and Digital Domain. The bee and the sheep are two of Estey’s favorites from the film, all the way from early movement tests. “We did these internal asset turntables where we presented a character, both internally and to the client. I decided to use that as a bit of a platform to have fun with the characters and see what we could do.” “And so,” adds Estey, “I had come up with this bee animation of him flying around a C-stand and then running into the camera, which made it into one of the trailers. That was just from an internal test. I really wanted to make him run into the camera and then knock it over. I even made him stain pollen on the lens. It was just to get a bit of a laugh out of everyone internally.” The sheep was a clear example of the way Wētā FX got to interpret the Minecraft universe for the film, flags Estey. “It was an example of the creative license and freedom that the animation team felt in creating some of the motion. There’s actually a moment where the sheep just randomly pukes up some grass that it’s been chewing. It was one of our animators who decided to try to give us a laugh by making it puke. I said, ‘I’m sending it.’ I knew Jared would probably love it and put it in the film, and sure enough he did.” “What’s fun about these characters,” comments Stopsack, “is that all of them were really treated as if they were the hero of the show. Each of them had their own unique little story. We even kept calling the Piglins by individual names, like Grunter, Trotsky, Snowball, Snout—so many. They all went through their own deserved cycle of working out, what is their appearance, body behavior and emotion?” ‘No longer the experts in the room’ While Wētā FX is used to solving complex visual effects problems, one aspect of working on A Minecraft Movie left the team perhaps more humbled than usual. “We were no longer the experts in the room,” admits Stopsack. “Typically, you are the supervisor, you go into the room, you give notes, and everyone expects you to have the answers. On this one, it was interesting because we were like, ‘OK, do this,’ and then, all of a sudden, a voice in the dailies review sessions would be, ‘Yeah, but in the game, it’s like this…’. And then, you’re like, ‘Okay, I learned a thing.’ We were constantly schooled about what is true in the game and what the rules are within Minecraft.” “We had so many people on the team that were just so savvy,” adds Stopsack. “They were consultants, really, because they’ve been living and breathing this game for most of their lives and they all chimed in. It was fantastic because it was a completely different level of engagement.”  Estey agrees, and to help honor the legacy of the video game he began playing it again during production with his son, now 14, but who originally played Minecraft when younger. “It helped me understand the ins and outs of it. I remember there was a dailies session where Sheldon was discussing the scene of Jack throwing some blocks to make a building. Sheldon was asking, ‘Should we maybe mix up the materials of these blocks?’ and I just chimed in by saying, ‘Well, make sure you don’t do dirt because dirt won’t stick on the side of wood, it’ll just fall to the ground.’ I really surprised myself, knowing this!” The post Behind the tool Wētā FX developed to help ‘blockify’ geometry in ‘A Minecraft Movie’ appeared first on befores & afters.