Darin Hilton Art and Design

IRONMAN 2

Concept design, 360 panoramas and full 3d environments

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Japanese garden concept sketch.

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Paintover on a film frame to get a sense of the height needed for the geometry and to provide a style guide.

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Another paintover/concept of the east view of the garden.

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Ambient Occlusion render of the temple side of the garden.

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beauty render with the dome comped in behind. I decided it would be fun to add a temple to the environment.

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North view Ambient occlusion render.

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North view beauty render

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East view ambient occlusion render

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East view beauty render with dome comped in.

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Japanese garden panorama. This was rendered with comp passes (depth etc) and was used in many of the garden shots that didn't require parallax.

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Final comp from the film (Full 3d render)

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FInal frame from the film (full 3d render)

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FInal frame from the film(Full 3d render).

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Exterior of the dome surrounding the garden. For a shot later in the film where the films atagonist blows himself up, I hand animated all the large trees to react to the shockwave of the blast.

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a frame from a sequence showing the New York state pavilion. Only the water feature and the foreground people were shot on set, the rest is computer generated including the crowd. I animated the elevator on the right going up to add some life.

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Interior pavilion matte painting. This was a multi layered projection shot, the entire frame at this point, including Ironman, is CGI

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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.