Lizardman
While Lola is a spin off from Hydraulx, separate from Lola - Hydraulx had a large number of their own shots, including multiple man, Some of Storm's effects sequences, and also the Convoy attack. Hydraulx use exclusively discreet system boxes for their compositing, with the world's largest Burn render farm. This new 64 bit farm allows artists to be assigned groups of shots and then work more flexibly on multiple shots at once. For the Convoy sequence car crushing completely 3D cars were deployed, crushed and discarded.
Storm
Hydraulx uses a multi-render pass approach to all their 3D. Both Flame stations and the company's Burn render farm have extensive spark / plugin licenses, allowing for complex shots, normally not financially viable to be rendered and composited.
Wolverine fight scene shot 1
For the famous claws, the real strap on claws could not be used during fight sequences as they are far too dangerous. For this sequence for example, Hugh Jackman would wear tracking markers - alternate colours for each 'claw' - " just so we can see what they are doing". The prop claws are custom build by a special effects expert called Jimmy Claws who takes his job very seriously.
In the end sequence when Wolverine is being "atomised', Bruno initially wanted to have Jackman act this naked, but Jackman was extremely concerned about images escaping onto the net, so a small pair of flesh coloured pants were worn. Ironically to maintain the film's rating, digital cloths had to be hand tracked and re-added back onto Jackman to cover him up. Not only was nudity an issue, but much work went into the death atomising to make it "oatmeal" according to Bruno and not too vivid.
Wolverine fight scene shot 2
Hydraulx used motion control footage for the multiple man sequence, with each "mutant clone" being a completely separate motion control pass.
Most of the actors did their own stunts. When Angel dives out of the clinic window, it is the real actor on wires that pulled off the stunt. The production actually got a "vrig from Cirque Du Soleil" which is a highly accurate computer controlled flying rig.
The final Alctraz sequence started life as an opening sequence. In the original storyboarding the Mutants were held on the famous Island and escaped. In this version Magneto still moved the bridge but he was of course not on it. When the rewrite happened, this sequence moved to the end of the film and the Dark Phenix rising scene. The Bridge Alctraz sequence was the first thing that the vfx team started on, and it was the last shot delivered on May 16th 2006. Due to terrorism laws, the production could not film within 1/4 mile (or a 1000ft) of the bridge with a chopper, - it could not even take a camera car or truck on the bridge, "so we walked over it a lot" joked Bruno. What stills they could take would often have the wrong fog or lighting for the final shots. Huge models were filmed, and often in an exterior car-park so real skies could be captured.
Another company who was responsible for a large number of shots was Weta. But while Weta handled a large amount of the final Alctraz, it did not start work until January. When we asked Weta's effects supervisor Eric Standon why that was, he admitted that perhaps they could have started in December but after Kong "there was really no one at Weta in December, we were fried". Standon was joined Weta in 1999 from Santa Barabra Studios to work on Gollium. (although his formal training is in Architecture) By comparison to Gollium's 15 mins a frame, and Kong sometimes 5 to 8 hours a frame rendertime, Wetas shots on Xmen "were almost real time: he jokes.
Weta work in Xmen 3 used both the procedural city texturing from King Kong, and LOTR's Massive software on X-Men. Massive software is now in two steams - the commercial version (now version 2)and also Weta internal use, headed by John Allit, who Standon described as "uses whatever he wanted, he so brilliant" . The Massive X-Men were not particularly complex - using the generic Agent that Weta already had as the agent base. Allit also wrote Weta's GRUNT renderer and thus is very comfortable with complex setups.
In terms of Weta's workflow, although Joe Latteri, did not work directly on X-Men, Standon explains that his philosophy of achieving almost everything in the 3D render is the 'house' approach to 3D compositing. Thus lighting is "rendered in and properly done" rather than doing multi-pass compositing such as Hydrolux above.
Many of Weta's 240 shots were relatively static or locked off, "by comparisons to Peter's work" which Standon explained are normally wildly hand held and wild. Match Moving was mainly done in 3D Equalizer. Shots were comped in Nuke and Shake. Weta had a large team on the project, given the short deadline, with "about 200 people in the final credits"
VFX on Xmen 3 were also provided by CIS Hollywood, Cinesite, Framestore CFC, General Lift LLC, Kleiser-Walczak, Rhythm & Hues, SoloVFX MPC and W.M Creations. Interestingly it was Bruno who was behind the process of breaking up films to different vendors. Prior to Bruno, feature films used to primarily award to just one company, Bruno pioneered the technique of breaking features into multiple vendor sets. While Burno commented that he primarily chooses facilities for the people he knows there. This multiple vendor - multiple country approached worked extremely well given the X-Men short schedule, but it was not without its humorous moments. During the death of Xavior at Jean Grey's House, Bruno commented that he got a call from MPC asking for visual reference of the roof shingles - as the UK company had no American style shingles locally to refer to - he joked. But in the end Burno said that he picked companies based on people he knew - who could speak his verbal 'short hand' and trusted. In the end he was extremely happy with his choices.
Bruno managed to bring X-Men in on budget or " 1% over " - compared to Day after Tomorrow that doubled its budget by the end of production, explained Burno. Much of the success of planning the film was due to the films extensive previz. The film had 6 storyboard artists and 3 previz companies working on the project, which "saves money" according to Bruno.
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