Avengers : Infinity War
I was Asset and Environments lead on Infinity War. When the brief was to create a photoreal jungle, savannah and waterfall gorge that had to interact with characters, crashing dropships and giant death wheels.. I had to pause and breath deep. Firstly, I had to train my team of artists ( and myself) to use a new tree generation tool with photoreal textures with scanned branch/ trunks, and to be auto rigged for simulation from root to leaf. Also supervised textures for Shuri's lab exterior and interior, and the damaged hulkbuster in the Gorge fight.
At the end of it the team had created 2 dozen hero trees from photogrammetry in speedtree with thousands of leaves, twigs and branches, and another 50+ bushes, shrubs, grass, rocks and pebbles that were rigged and could be simulated.
For characters we had to take over hulk buster's final damage through the gorge fight and make him look wet.
There were also shared characters from Framestore and Dneg to ingest and look dev for our shots.
One of the jungle shots that i got to start blocking out and finished by Stanley Wong. We had to look at reference from Uganda jungles and how to make the trees look naturally spaced but also dressed to allow the ship crashing to look cool.
Some of our hero trees in action.
Was in charge of unifying and optimising the look dev across all our foilage assets to make sure they were optimised and had the correct level of detail for shot.
The Wakanda trenches was also a fully CG environment. We had to dress in every pebble, shrub and accacia tree. And also the trenches left behind by the Threshers. Setdressing by Ram Verma and trench textures by Nicholas Gwee.
Wakanda Gorge was an interesting splice of CG with Tallulah Gorge plate spliced together. The pool of rocks and waterfall were fully CG. Environment model by Waldemar Bartkowiak, rock textures by Daniel Gagiu and look development by me.
The cliff face was mainly stitched hires drone photographs of Tallulah gorge. Dressing the waterfall pool was a tight balance between Animation and Water Sims to place each rock and ground plane perfectly.
Alot of effort went to dressing the rocks under the water so that simulations could create realistic and interesting flows and allowing lighting to refract detail from the waterbed.
Cull Obsidian character done by Framestore. Was responsible for look development and wet shading for this sequence.
Proxima Midnight character done by Double Negative. Additional textures by Gareth Jensen. I was responsible for the look development in this sequence. Painting additional dirt on her face, and dishevel her hair as the trench fight progressed.
Some of the forest and Gorge breakdowns here from 4:33 and 6:32