VFX Luma Pictures shares the VFX Breakdown of Thanos from 'Guardians of the Galaxy' -

Luma Pictures shares the VFX Breakdown of Thanos from ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’

The Californian based visual effects studio, Luma Pictures recently uploaded a near two minute video on their website, breaking down the VFX artwork behind creating Marvel’s Galactic Super villain, Thanos.

Thanos voiced by Men in Black 3 actor, Josh Brolin debuted first on-screen in the end-credit cameo of Marvel’s Avengers (2012). Last year Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) showed a bit more of the Galactic King.

The VFX Breakdown video shows the detailing behind creating those scenes of Thanos from Guardians of the Galaxy. While the tent-pole employed a vast army of artists from 13 visual effect studios, it was Luma Pictures that created a facial animation system for the notorious super villain, Thanos. The artists from Luma Pictures captured the actor Josh Brolin’s facial expressions and recreated a fully CGI-based Thanos right very much on the lines from the comic strips.

Luma visual effects supervisor Vincent Cirelli commented that, “He (Thanos)had to be the bad assand we had to give him the performance and the weight that that deserved. Loic Zimmermann our concept designer took the most prevalent features of Josh that we thought would stand out the most and put them into who the character is underneath.” Providing further details Vincent mentioned that, “We began blending those elements. We’ve taken Josh’s eyes, some of his cheek, how his muscles move when he talks and blended that into his caricature.”

The video underlines what Vincent had to say showing the various 3D digital models of Thanos’ face and how the Josh’s eye movements were captured and reanimated into Thanos’ CGI incarnation.

Brolin’s facial expressions were captured using the Mova system where Josh’s performance was directly driven into a mesh. The studio did face a structural challenge as Thanos’ mesh was vastly different in the forms than the human anatomy. Staying true to the comics’ persona, Thanos has an incredibly large jaw and deep grooves running all along his face. Alternatively the studio used the new facial animation software Face2face that captures the entire performance of the actor and dissects all the muscle movements.

“The animation out of Face2Face got the studio about 75% of the way there,” notes Cirelli, “We then had additional tools in simulation that add subtle movement across the surface, then there’s blood scattering, compression, extensions mattes to help push displacement up down for wrinkles and skin. Then there’s a final displacement on top of that.” Thanos’ skin was done using the hand-painted CG textures in MARI which was also used for Thanos’ alien-like distinct armor.

Apart from Guardians of the Galaxy, Luma Pictures has credibly worked on other Marvel projects including Captain America – The First Avenger, Captain America – The Winter Solider, Iron Man 3, Thor 2 – The Dark World and also contributed to Fox’s X-Men – The Wolverine Origins and X-Men – The First Class.

VFX