Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings | WITHOUT VFX | CGI Breakdown | VFX Breakdown
Channel: Spectrum Film School
Date: 2022-05-14

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings had a multitude of VFX houses producing over 2000 VFX shots, 1,761 of them made the final cut of a movie that broke the MCU movie cookie-cutter mold along with various box office records.

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RodeoFX, Scanline, Trixter, Rising Sun Pictures, Digital Domain, Weta Digital, Fin Design + Effects, Luma Pictures, and Method studios all combined their VFX superpowers to produce yet another Marvel blockbuster.

Rising Sun Pictures.
Rising Sun was given the mammoth task of creating the massive Ta Lo environment where a large part of the movie transpires and the digital jungle that would serve as a backdrop for the latter parts of the film.

The Ta Lo environment is approximately 75 square kilometers of jungle, mountains, lakes, and rice paddies whose look was based on southeast Asia.
RSP started by laying out a physical structure based on research they did on forested areas of Vietnam and East Indonesia and then built up a library of trees and flora based on their research, this included many different varieties of bamboo.

The team wanted the environment to feel completely natural despite being 100% CGI so instead of "hand picking" where to put a waterfall or lake purely for aesthetic reasons they decided to use procedural methods.

They ran erosion simulations to wear away parts of the landscape where water would naturally run and tree and plant density were dependent on whether an area was wet or dry and how much sun it received.
This method meant that vegetation appeared where you'd subconsciously expect it to, giving the environment a much more natural feel and allowing for happy accidents to occur much as they do with nature itself.

Trixter.
Trixter was given the rather awkward job of creating creatures based on Chinese mythology and making them look real whilst still maintaining their magical feel and they found themselves constantly battling to maintain the illusion.

There are some extremely strange animals on our planet but we accept them to be real because they are so detailed and realistic, Trixter had to create a fox with nine tails, a horse with scales and a dragon's face, and a creature with no face, four wings, and 6 legs! and, they had to make us believe they we real!
Funnily enough, the dragon-horse was the hardest to get right,
How does a fur-covered area on an animal transition into a scaley area? We don't know, no animal has both.
How do metallic teal scales react to light compared to hair? we don't know, no animal has metallic teal scales.
For his face, they tried blending the original 2008 asset with a 3D representation of the face of the actor who played Emil Blonsky in the 2008 film.

Rodeo FX.
Rodeo was planning to travel to Macau to shoot background plates and reference plates and get HDRs, scans, and photogrammetry, but then the pandemic hit, travel was restricted, and the only really viable option left to them was to create a fully CG Macau.
Making Macau.

First Rodeo had a question, How do you build a replica of a city when you don't have any data on its topography or geometry? they didn't know the answer, so they googled it!
"Google Maps" that is.
Using Google Maps, Open-Street-Map data, and photogrammetry tools they extracted a rough geometry of every building in Macau and used that data to populate an empty canvas, next they extracted the elevation and topography data and used it to displace the ground plane of that canvas.

Bamboo Scaffold.
Since the building used for the "Bamboo Scaffold" Fight Scene was going to be a CG "In-Construction" skyscraper, the team had to plan whereabouts in the city they were going to place it. Once they had its exact location nailed down they could then break down which of the neighboring buildings would need to be "Hero" buildings and which could be 2.5D Digital matte paintings.

For the Bamboo scaffold fight scene, the team created a rough mock-up of the scene and tagged every shot to its location on the building, this enabled them to determine which window the characters would emerge from at the start of the scene, over how many stories the action took place, and which windows would be damaged.