Avengers: Infinity War VFX Breakdown

In the film, the Thanos character was primarily produced by Digital Domain, who did more than 400 shots. Digital Domain team used Autodesk Maya for modeling, rigging and animation; Chaos Group’s V-Ray for rendering; Side Effects Houdini for effects; a proprietary Maya plug-in called Atomic for lighting; and Digital Domain’s new Masquerade tool and their custom Direct Drive for transferring motion capture data to the CG character.

Further on Weta Digital handled the major fight on Titan between Thanos and Dr Strange, Star-lord, Spiderman, Mantus, Drax and Ironman. Weta Digital created the 12-foot tall purple villain for sequences on Titan. Weta Digital worked on 398 shots.

Framestore completed 253 shots for the opening act of Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Infinity War. From the moment Bruce Banner crashes into Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum in Greenwich Village to the epic ‘Race to Space’ sequence, our varied and action-packed work includes building the New York environment in CG, crafting the Q-ship, and creating CG friends old and new: Iron Man, Spider-Man, Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian.

Framestore had the unique opportunity to be creatively involved in the planning of the work, with a team of 160 artists, led by VFX Supervisor Patric Roos and CG Supervisor Rob Allman, crafting the dramatic opening.

The New York fight sequence sees well-known Marvel characters Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Wong (Benedict Wong) and Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) take on members of the Black Order in an action-packed attack. ‘We were awarded a whole act, which was a really nice body of work’, says Patric Roos, VFX Supervisor. ‘The work was a real mix of full CG shots, plate shots, FX, set extensions, magic spells and a lot of character work.’

Roos supervised the shoot at Pinewood Studios, Atlanta in which large areas around Doctor Strange’s sanctum had been built, as well as the green screen, which the team extended to mimic Manhattan. The fight moves on to Washington Square Park, which was replaced in full CG. Framestore’s Capture Lab spent a month in Manhattan and New Jersey shooting photo reference, LIDAR and gigapixel panoramas to capture the the environments that had to be recreated in CG. ‘Production closed down whole city blocks’, says Richard Graham, CaptureLab Studio Manager. ‘We came back with more than 250,000 photos and 15TB of data to be used by the environments team to build Washington Square Park and the West Village, among others.’

Framestore tackled the character development of the Black Order members for around a year before post production, feeding into the Marvel Vis Dev group. A small in-house team created animation vignettes to delve further into their personalities and character traits.