ILP

NBC – Constantine, Ep. 105 Breakdown

“The swarming effect was for most shots done with a custom Maya particle rig that allowed us to easily control shape, path, speed and noise of the particles. We would playblast little colored spheres for Kevin, Constantine’s VFX supervisor, which he would give feedback on. Once the animation was blocked and approved we switched the particles to vray proxies containing high-res animation cycles. On top of that we added hand animated “hero” bugs in the shots where we felt it was needed. All the close-up shots or single to a couple of bugs shots were fully hand animated. This was then all rendered using Vray’s standard lights and materials, utilizing HDRI’s shot on set. In some cases we also did camera projections of the environment in order to get the right bounce and reflections on our bugs.” -Yafei Wu, Vfx Supervisor

Other work for this episode included the withering faces of people possessed by this demon. It was achieved by match moving the actors faces and replacing them with digitally enhanced faces.

A very gritty episode indeed! Which just added to the fun factor.

It was a fantastic episode to work on, and we are very happy with the result!” - Niklas Jacobson, Vfx Supervisor