Pacific Rim: Uprising's Jaegers Had Over 1000 UDIMs At 4K

Rassoul Edj, an experienced VFX artist known for sharing behind-the-scenes insights into his CGI work on Transformers: ROTB and, most recently, some previous Transformers installments, has revealed fascinating details about the creation of Jaegers for the Pacific Rim series.

DNEG, the studio behind Pacific Rim: Uprising and the original film, used an average of over 1000 UDIMs at 4K resolution for the Jaegers humanoid mechs, owing to their massive scale and the high level of detail required. Due to the immense computational power required for the task, DNEG employed veteran 3D modeling and rendering software Clarisse to bake their data maps.

Rassoul Edj revealed that the Transformers: ROTB team faced the same issue during production. Graphics cards lacked the necessary VRAM to bake such large amounts of 4K data, so Edj designed a custom baker using Pixar's RenderMan, which could run on the render farm to process the heavier assets.

The artist also mentioned that he never used Clarisse in production but experimented with it for personal projects, finding it great for environments, yet below average for other tasks. "The speed differences between it and RenderMan were one of the main reasons DNEG dropped it for RenderMan and Solaris. RenderMan is the most powerful and versatile renderer, even if it isn't the fastest", added Rassoul Edj.

Regarding the massive number of UDIMs in Pacific Rim, the artist explained that this level of detail was essential based on the scale and specific requirements of the Jaegers. The required UV texel density is calculated for the assets at the start of production based on factors like asset scale, show resolution, and how closely the assets need to hold up in shots.

As you can see, working on projects with massive singular assets, like Pacific Rim and Transformers, demands a lot of data management and optimization to handle I/O through the pipeline. Take a look at some screenshots of DNEG's workflows in Substance 3D Designer for the Jaegers and learn more the the studio's breakdown of texturing hero assets for the movie:

See the original Rassoul Edji's post for more details and read our interview with the artist on creating a lifelike Samurai character, covering the process of texturing the model's detailed skin and intricate armor using Mari and Substance 3D Painter:

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