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August 13, 2013: Dan Lemmon from Weta Digital Talks "Man of Steel" VFX

With a team of 500 artists working on over 600 shots for a year and four months, Weta Digital's work on "Man of Steel" encompassed all of the scenes on Krypton and much of the interior spaceship sequences. VFX Supervisor Dan Lemmon spoke with ArtofVFX.com about the process of bringing the planet Krypton and its technology to life. Here's a few excerpts from the interview...

Krypton is presented as a completely new style. How did you create this planet?

Alex's artwork and reference research was very helpful to us. His team had done a number of illustrations and rough 3D models that gave us an overall look-and-feel template to follow and a broad-strokes lay of the land. They included references photos of strip mines and quarries to which we added our own references, and we pulled from those real-world images to help ground our fictitious world in reality. Part of the storyline is that the landscape of Krypton has been mined bare leaving great hulking plates of vertical waste rock running across the planet. In Krypton City those vertical plates have been hollowed out to create a massive grillwork of soaring rock arches under which most of the city resides. We went to great lengths to make sure that we had the right kind of rock to build those kinds of structures. I was specifically looking for large, hard, flat rock formations and ended up spending Easter weekend laser scanning basalt cliffs on the South Island of New Zealand with Keith Miller, another VFX Supervisor on the film.

How did you handle so many elements to animate?

From an animation standpoint, our work was pretty straightforward. We had a few creatures and robots that we had to figure out in terms of how they move and what they can do, but there actually weren't too many of them. We were usually dealing with less than two dozen animated assets. Of course, when it came to making the screens for all the robots and ships, that's another story. We developed a whole system for simulating the liquid geo beads on top of basic shape animations that drove the Kryptonian displays.

Read the entire interview at ArtofVFX.com.