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August 5, 2013: Examining the Computer Graphics in "Man of Steel"

Black Zero From the look of the planet Krypton to the flow of Superman's cape, computer graphics played a major part in bringing "Man of Steel" to life on the big screen. In an article which looks into the technology and software used throughout the movie, Computer Graphics World goes indepth with visual effects supervisors Guilluame Rocheron and John Des Jardin to find out what was involved in the two year process.

    Usually, when the film crew shot Cavill on location, he didn't wear Superman's cape. "When we shot live action with the cape, it would fall behind him and not do anything," Rocheron says. "But we wanted that big flare. We wanted to control that. So we had a little rig with simple dynamics that the animators could use to pose the cape and time it nicely to what Superman was doing. We'd reference illustrations by Alex Ross. Once we had a sign-off on the keyframe poses, we'd run the simulation. The keyframe poses drove the simulation."

    Autodesk's nCloth within Maya provided the dynamics. "We had a layer of custom tools to connect the animation pass to nCloth," Rocheron says.

    Rocheron estimates that they added a digital cape to 70 percent of the shots. "If the cape is an extension of his body action, we added it," he says. "The first time you see Superman in the movie, you can tell it's him just by looking at the silhouette because the cape forms that super-iconic Alex Ross shape."

Read the entire article at the CGW.com website.

Thanks to Philip Schlickenmaier for the lead on this article.


2013 Movie News

Listed below are all the Movie News items archived for 2013 organized into various categories:

“Man of Steel” Movie News:

“Superman/Batman” Movie News: “Justice League” Movie News: “Superman: Unbound” Animated Movie News: “Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox” Animated Movie News: “Justice League: War” Animated Movie News: Christopher Reeve Movie News: Other Movie News:

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