Presentation
Wētā FX Presents: The Last Of Us Season 2: The Horde
DescriptionStarting with an exciting and challenging client brief – an infected horde thawing from frozen stasis to overrun the town of Jackson, and a tight timeline for this ambitious work, meant our Wētā FX team really had something to sink our teeth into.
VFX Supervisor Nick Epstein and Animation Supervisor Dennis Yoo will take you through how Wētā FX worked with the production VFX team to previs, build, animate, and integrate a thousand-strong horde to the gritty realism of The Last of Us Season 2.
Usually crowd work suggests compromises, but as this talk will show, for this artfully chaotic sequence there were none. Every infected was designed and built to hold up full screen, with full cloth and hair simulation, and a full set of face shapes. Essentially, every crowd character was a hero character, and that presented a lot of challenges.
Taking you onset, Nick will explore how Wētā's Previs was developed with and utilised by the production team to capture some incredibly complex action with confidence that it would translate to a predictable, yet flexible final product.
Extremely variable shooting conditions required innovative solutions, including the development of a robust depth extraction toolkit which enabled varying weather patterns to be inserted into any plate, and the entirely CG horde to easily be intermingled with live action performers.
Flexibility and variation was one of the most important design factors to consider to bring the sequence to life. For this, we required a ‘mix and match’ system that would allow any piece of clothing to be dynamically refitted to any infected, regardless of proportions, and crucially this needed to be represented upfront in animation as well as renders later.
Dennis will outline the challenging combination of motion capture, keyframe animation, and ragdoll dynamics required to achieve a realistic, but also somewhat inhuman – infected – cadence to horde performances.
This talk will detail the process for building a vast digital assets wardrobe based on client provided scans, and adapting these across the infected horde using a procedural texturing system in lighting, usually utilised earlier in the pipeline by lookdev.
In addition to this, the episode needed extensive cloth and hair simulation at a scale previously not undertaken at Wētā. This was further complicated by the dynamic refitting of garments, as well as the use of ragdoll dynamics, resulting in some (sometimes) comically terrifying situations for our creature team to wrestle through.
We developed a Nuke based system for ‘weather fixes’ driven by challenging conditions during the Jackson siege shoot. Finally, we’ll talk about how our environment/DMP team handled full replacements - from the snowfields and mountains surrounding Jackson in different weather conditions, to full CG forested snowscapes.
Last but certainly not least, is the return of the iconic Bloater. The new unforgiving environment and intense weather conditions meant that we had to carefully rethink the complex character build, and how to achieve all the menacing details…
VFX Supervisor Nick Epstein and Animation Supervisor Dennis Yoo will take you through how Wētā FX worked with the production VFX team to previs, build, animate, and integrate a thousand-strong horde to the gritty realism of The Last of Us Season 2.
Usually crowd work suggests compromises, but as this talk will show, for this artfully chaotic sequence there were none. Every infected was designed and built to hold up full screen, with full cloth and hair simulation, and a full set of face shapes. Essentially, every crowd character was a hero character, and that presented a lot of challenges.
Taking you onset, Nick will explore how Wētā's Previs was developed with and utilised by the production team to capture some incredibly complex action with confidence that it would translate to a predictable, yet flexible final product.
Extremely variable shooting conditions required innovative solutions, including the development of a robust depth extraction toolkit which enabled varying weather patterns to be inserted into any plate, and the entirely CG horde to easily be intermingled with live action performers.
Flexibility and variation was one of the most important design factors to consider to bring the sequence to life. For this, we required a ‘mix and match’ system that would allow any piece of clothing to be dynamically refitted to any infected, regardless of proportions, and crucially this needed to be represented upfront in animation as well as renders later.
Dennis will outline the challenging combination of motion capture, keyframe animation, and ragdoll dynamics required to achieve a realistic, but also somewhat inhuman – infected – cadence to horde performances.
This talk will detail the process for building a vast digital assets wardrobe based on client provided scans, and adapting these across the infected horde using a procedural texturing system in lighting, usually utilised earlier in the pipeline by lookdev.
In addition to this, the episode needed extensive cloth and hair simulation at a scale previously not undertaken at Wētā. This was further complicated by the dynamic refitting of garments, as well as the use of ragdoll dynamics, resulting in some (sometimes) comically terrifying situations for our creature team to wrestle through.
We developed a Nuke based system for ‘weather fixes’ driven by challenging conditions during the Jackson siege shoot. Finally, we’ll talk about how our environment/DMP team handled full replacements - from the snowfields and mountains surrounding Jackson in different weather conditions, to full CG forested snowscapes.
Last but certainly not least, is the return of the iconic Bloater. The new unforgiving environment and intense weather conditions meant that we had to carefully rethink the complex character build, and how to achieve all the menacing details…
Presenters
Event Type
Production Session
TimeWednesday, 13 August 20252:45pm - 3:30pm PDT
LocationWest Building, Ballroom AB
Session TimeWednesday, 13 August 20252:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
LocationWest Building, Ballroom AB
Production & Animation
Not Livestreamed
Not Recorded
Animation
Capture/Scanning
Lighting
Simulation
Full Conference
Virtual Access
Wednesday
