With Doctor Strange now in the cinema, you have probably seen the sequence set in New York city, which is quite frankly, mind bendingly great.
Late last year, I took one of our kits to New York and spent 2 weeks with the ILM crew, scanning streets and skylines. Both presented numerous challenges.
- The Street scans could only happen during the day, so we had to work around the public. This created a lot of clean-up and removal of noise from all those New Yorkers walking about.
- The High Elevation scans were fantastic to do. But working at that height (from the top of the World Trade Centre complex) was tricky. Firstly the scanner had to be hoisted over the side of the building, and the scan durations were long due to the distance. And of course, its a lot windier up there than it is on the side walk
- it rained…. quite a bit.
But the end results were spectacular (well, we think so anyway!)
As requested by ILM, via Marvel, we then set about creating P.R.A’s (Production Ready Assets). These are models that are 100% ready for use in the VFX pipeline. Not dense meshes, but models with the correct QUAD TOPOLOGY. This provides a model that is ready to be textured, split down the middle or warped and morphed into an alternate state of reality as only the Good Doctor can.
This is the main corner building you catch a glimpse of in the Memorial Day parade.
