LogInThe studio talked about the work on the HBO series.
Visual effects studio DNEG has shared its experience working on HBO's The Last of Us show. In an interview with Art of VFX, supervisors Stephen James, Nick Marshall, and Melaina Mace discussed their approach to creating post-apocalyptic versions of cities and explained how the vegetation was made.
DNEG mostly worked on the environments, some effects for the Statehouse explosion, rain, and a Clicker. It was responsible for the Boston, Kansas City, and Jackson Quarantine Zones. The team created many areas of destroyed Boston and Salt Lake City, including fully collapsed buildings, cratered streets, and leaning skyscrapers.
"What I always loved about The Last of Us games was that each environment told many stories, and set the tone for the characters and the players along with them," said James. "What happened there on outbreak day? Who has passed through since then? How did mother nature reclaim it? We always started with this and encouraged the artists on our team to tell their own story. Depending on the sequence, we would dial between finding inspiration from the games, the real life locations, and the on-set production design."
Marshall added that the studio's toolset consisted of three main techniques: "build of full CG destroyed city buildings, build of non-destroyed buildings ... and extensive use of matte painting with camera projection mapping."
DNEG's Build department made more than 25 unique building assets for the Boston sequences to match buildings from the location shoot in Alberta, as well as Boston architecture. The assets had full interior structures and dressing.
"Our environment and FX teams then ran destruction simulations on each, adding additional debris and set dressing, such as moving blinds and wires, for extra detail. We also created a number of generic destroyed buildings that could be re-used from multiple angles to fill out our background city. Once building destruction was creatively approved, our environments team designed procedural ivy set-ups and vegetation scatters for each hero building," shared Mace.
The team created vegetation for the series procedurally in SpeedTree using scattering techniques in Houdini and Clarisse to populate the scenes. "The ivy systems were a complex procedural setup of multiple ivy genus that allowed for control of interconnecting living and dead growth. Procedural setups were also built for adding details like cables and rubble."
There were many challenging areas to recreate, but one of the most difficult was the rooftop of the Bostonian Museum as it required an elaborate and accurate build of a specific Boston district. The team used photogrammetry, open source data, and location photography to extensively build out downtown Boston, "and used the city bombing as a justification to alter the skyline just enough to allow us to hit all the narrative points in the short sequence, including the final unobstructed view of the Statehouse."
It was certainly not a small task, and if you'd like to learn more about the production, read the full interview here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform, our Reddit page, and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
Keep reading
You may find these articles interesting