IRONMAN 2
IRONMAN 2
Concept design, 360 panoramas and full 3d environments
Ironman 2 (2010)
I worked with a team completing several matte paintings of the New York Pavilion from the 1964 world's fair, before moving on to the japanese garden environment situated in a giant geodesic dome. This environment was in 100 shots from the movie.
The original intent was to create the garden as a 2d panorama using photo reference, but I felt it would be difficult to achieve believable lighting conditions, especially as most of the reference was shot during the day and in less than ideal conditions.
Taking a personal risk, I build the garden as a 3d environment, developing a new 3d pipeline for Maya and Mentalray. It paid off in the end, as the lighting had a rich detailed feel that captured the original concepts from the production team. I worked closely with VFX supervisor Ben Snow to craft a believable environment, using Maya paintfx to lay in fallen leaves, grass planes and details like pathways, lanterns, bridges and benches.
I supervised the development of the 3d dome model that covered the garden. This was modeled by outsourcing studio Virtuos in China. It proved difficult to light the dome effectively requiring lot of tweaking to the model and the shaders (especially the glass reflections)
I rendered a detailed panorama of the environment for many of the shots where a full 3d render wasn't necessary, this was used extensively by the compositing team later in the film for the final battle between Ironman, War Machine and Vanko the antagonist.
Production was so happy with the results of the garden renders that towards the end of the show I was given an establishing shot of the New York pavilion, another iconic and fun shot.
Iron Man 2 went on to make $623.9 million at the box office and was nominated for an Academy award for best visual effects.
DARIN HILTON
San Francisco, CA,
darinhilton@mail.com