How Iron Man's VFX Evolved Over 11 Years | Movies Insider

if you look at iron man's first suit the mark 1 and compare it to the hero's nanotech suit from avengers in-game a lot has changed but it's not just the technology in the world of the mcu animation tech has evolved in our world the real world to make this suit possible on the big screen something that marvel couldn't have dreamed of creating just 11 years earlier to get from here to here required a decade of innovation 10 marvel movies and a lot of work on movies with no superhero in sight let's start where tony stark's story began in that cave in 2008's iron man in this scene tony stark is a man in a giant metal suit trying to escape a cave so what better way to make it seem real than by using a real man in a real metal suit iron man director john favreau is known for pushing the envelope with his projects like the lion king and the mandalorian but back then he wasn't confident that cgi could convincingly create a full ironman suit so they went practical for that first bulky cave suit he enlisted the help of the legendary stan winston studio now called legacy effects to make this 90 pound version of the mark 1 with epoxy armor shells flexible urethane leather and aluminum and for the project winston's team perfected a metallic chrome paint that would be used for other projects years down the road but the film had to rely on cgi for this section of the scene because the practical suit was just too large for either robert downey jr or his stunt double to move around in that left the challenge of creating the first digital iron man suit audiences would see up to the embassy in vancouver their accomplishment wouldn't have been possible without the practical work from stan winston studio they modeled the digital suit closely after the real suit even going so far as getting pieces of that real suit flown to canada for reference the digital version was so detailed that it even captures these text markings and textures and to create a realistic metallic reflection the embassy used the knowledge they learned from working on car commercials to influence how they shaded the digital version of the suit we learned a lot about car paint about clear coat how light plays on cars how they rack to their environment which they're essentially mirrors of their environment but that was just the mark one the mark ii would have to be sleeker and more refined and have a polished coat that would accurately reflect light like the night sky in this scene once again favreau had stan winston create a real version of this suit but what you're looking at here is completely computer generated just like with the mark 1 fx studio industrial light and magic ilm for short used that practical version of the suit as the basis for its digital version ilm was so successful that when favreau saw it he couldn't tell the difference between the real and the fake and we showed it to john and the marvel team and they're like okay well which bits did you replace and we're like actually we replaced the whole thing without this early work in the first iron man which convinced the filmmakers and the world of what vfx could do the wild world of marvel as we know it might not exist but the true test of the cgi would come with the mark iii iron man's most recognizable look this had to be perfect for the film to work and resonate with fans ilm wanted to prove both that they could make the cgi character move the right way and that his metal armor matched the personality of tony stark ilm had worked with shiny car surfaces in 2007's transformers which ultimately helped them nail down the outer layer of the mark iii they made the suit look more like a glossy sports car than industrial metal as marvel initially planned we ended up saying you know what it's tony stark he's a playboy you know he's rich he's not gonna have an industrial forklift type suit he's gonna want a sports car suit the basic design was based on marvel comic book artist adi granov's iron man illustrations but one of the biggest challenges with replicating this 2d suit in real life was that the comic version was designed with heroic proportions that don't match real human beings so they tweaked the model to be shaped as if a real human being were inside something they would later decide to change but when it came to iron man we tried to be very like oh no a real guy could fit in the suit and the real mechanism between the suit and the guy is there now the guy would have to be extremely thin to really fit into it at the onset of iron man 2 motion capture technology had really advanced which made it possible for them to use a combination of practical and cgi suits various practical versions of the mark iii suit were built by stan winston's team which could be worn in pieces based on which parts of robert downey jr were seen on camera at the time the rest of his body was often covered in a motion capture suit which would be filled in later with cg suit pieces this would help his performance since he didn't have to struggle under the bulk and weight of the full suit ilm used its custom motion capture technology called imo cap which they had fine-tuned in 2003's pirates of the caribbean to animate the cg parts of the suit since robert downey jr's head wasn't animated it had to match up perfectly or else it would look wobbly and disjoin it in several of the films robert downey jr often just wore these shoulder pads or what they called a football suit these shots required a lot of cgi cleanup on the spaces in between like his neck and joints vfx artists really advanced the motion tracking in iron man 2 and you can see a good example of that here in this japanese garden scene the actors only wore partial helmets and tracking suits the rest of their suits are cgi and in this particular scene ilm didn't even need to use a tracking suit at all they built the cgi suit right around robert downey jr who was only wearing a tuxedo this took a lot of time and effort to get right but it ultimately set the bar for future films in terms of what they could animate without mocap suits another major improvement from the first film in iron man 2 was the shading or how the suit was lit ilm started using image-based lighting tools they developed from their work on 2009's terminator salvation to light the suit and make it look more realistic this process involved taking high-res pictures of the environment and using those as a guide to more accurately and easily light the suit this ultimately helped iron man look even better allowing them more time to focus on the finer details it meant that we were able to speed up our process and spend a lot more time making things creatively look good instead of you know just like oh is it even looking real or not not only did the animation evolve as the vfx technology advanced but each new film also posed new challenges for animators based on the story for instance when it came to 2012's the avengers it was the script that pushed how the character would be designed and animated instead of hand thrusters iron man would get a rocket pack attached to the back of his suit which allowed the design team leeway to develop new poses for the character while freeing up the hero's hands or take a look at this sequence known internally as the car wash scene because of this brand new way marvel writers envisioned how tony's suit would attach to him animators for the first time had to figure out how the inside of iron man's suit would function which none of the vfx studios marvel worked with had to think much about before we had to build a lot of new interior pieces kind of figure out like what the interior tech of the suit would look like as it as it joined together this was particularly challenging since he's walking the entire time while de-suiting a first in the series ilm had to create models for each piece of the suit and track them individually with his movement and take a look at this battle scene with thor in the mountaintop notice all of the blue light the minor detail caused a major headache with animators at weta digital when it came to coloring iron man's suit marvel maintains a strict color bible which keeps track of the exact hues that are supposed to be used across the various films the brushed gold surface here was based on weta digital's work on the one ring in lord of the rings and they were able to recreate this color fairly easily but the red on the other hand it's actually a red clear coat which means that the red the red pigment itself actually has density um and on top of that there's actually little little metal shavings suspended in that dense paint which can cause problems when you mix in light from the environment in this case the red and blue made purple you know one of the first things we ran into back then was that you take a suit like that and put a blue light on it and it starts to give you weird colors it starts to want to go really burgundy you know sort of a mulberry color very fast balancing the color would end up being much easier and faster in the later films as weta develops new advanced rendering technology that worked with various wavelengths of light and this as was the case with ilm and its shading technology would make the suit look better overall we could spend a lot of time trying to make that car paint look just a little bit cooler or try to make the lighting work a little bit better and not just trying to get rid of weird shadows or weird colors while the earlier films mostly focused on the movements of one individual suit iron man 3 introduced a whole slew of new suits about 20 in a single scene that each had to be animated in different ways typically to animate iron man they would use what's called a puppet and there's a limited number of ways this puppet can move sowetta developed new tools for its animators to use to alter the rig of the puppet to increase the freedom of movement so each suit could have more character and style we rejig the entire process to allow the animator to go in and take the high resolution suit and just you know like with an x-acto knife he'd cut on different planes and cut different parts of it out and put hinges on them on the fly so that he could actually uh you know the animator could define how the suit grew one of the challenges that comes with more freedom of movement however is making sure iron man's metal plates don't run into each other and figuring out where all the pieces go when he does a simple motion like raising his arm i think the main challenge we had on iron man 3 was the shoulders he had used huge shoulder pad but it wasn't just these major battle scenes that were difficult they often had to also spend time figuring out how he moved in more mundane scenarios we saw for the first time in iron man 3 scenes where he is doing these very non-heroic actions like giving a massage or simply sitting on a couch it's easier to hide any errors and subtleties in a cloud of dust or debris according to ilm when he isn't fighting someone every detail is right out there in the open iron man 3 also had tony stark reacting and performing along with the suit assembly for the first time a step up from the walking car wash scene in the avengers as marvel wanted an even more advanced look to the tech this was especially difficult according to vfx studio trickster since they had to combine rigid metal pieces and flexible human body parts while making it all look seamless 24 separate parts were first disguised as what trickster calls amorphous mystery slick pieces of technology alien to any distinguishable suit parts each would then transform into the familiar suit pieces as they flew towards him as the series evolved from using practical effects in iron man to a mix of practical and cgi to mostly cgi in later films suddenly the suit which was originally tweaked to be more human would now be tweaked to be more heroic again we first saw subtle changes in the avengers with his legs a little little facts that a lot of people probably don't know iron man's legs are longer than a human's legs his ankle would also have to be a mere inch and a half across inside the suit iron man was also slimmed down a bit in avengers age of ultron to give him more of a comic superhero silhouette slightly tighter waist that sort of thing a little beefier around the shoulders but the suit evolved yet again in the last two films forcing the animators to evolve as well and take a whole different approach to how the suit would build and move tony stark was now using nanotechnology so instead of moving around and tracking solid pieces like they did with the car wash scene and the scene in his workshop they had to establish a whole new process for his suit assembly nanotech involves multiple layers of simulations a liquid metal simulation would morph to the target shape because they wanted the transformation to feel organic but they had to make sure it still felt rigid and that it did not stretch like spider-man's suit would the animators relied on accurate shading a technique used throughout the franchise to accomplish this main visual trickery is that through the shading we it looked like metal every single time robert downey jr reportedly came up with the idea of having tony stark's sweatsuit tightened before the armor shell appears similar to spiderman's suit which you can see here because it would be difficult for the material to form a shell around loose clothing if you look closely octagonal shapes attach together to form the outer layer while an inner layer of tech and circuitry built beneath it frame store actually created this multi-layer effect using animation tools from its work on 2015's poltergeist for in-game this nanotech suit evolved slightly to be a bit more rigid with pieces locking into place more like the suit we saw in captain america civil war we took the lessons that we learned from infinity war and applied it to endgame so it was the same technology really but we just had a better handle of it while iron man's death was the last time we would see the nanotech suit this wouldn't be the last time we saw iron man as marvel's innovation continued for his one final cameo in spider-man far from home this suit was also created by frame store and it was actually based on the suit in captain america civil war because it was more solid looking than the nanotech suit in avengers in-game to make this suit they took the same civil war model and literally broke it down destroyed it and created the incise which consisted of various wires and circuit boards using an early scene in age of ultron as inspiration there is more detail in the top half of the suit because more of that is shown up close on camera and to achieve the undead look first they added the signature metallic sheen of iron man and then they added the layers of dirt and rust to be fair the shoot is almost not recognizable by the end of the process so after 11 years of development to perfect iron man's cgi suit it ultimately was destroyed by using advancements in 3d modeling and motion tracking experimenting with new lighting techniques and using realistic-looking practical models as a base they were able to create something that continually felt fresh futuristic and real as it evolved in the story it wasn't like anybody had thought that a person could wear a suit of powered armor and it would look anything other than like a guy an old night armor wobbling around on a set he's so crafted on so many levels there's so much thought that goes into every little panel that moves that you're you're intrigued and you're compelled to keep watching them and find out what's going to happen

Channel: Insider

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Keywords: Insider, movies, entertainment, marvel, animation, iron man, evolution, movie insider, superhero, marvel movies, marvel universe, animate

Id: GqsO40pm0-I

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020