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

If you look at Iron Man's first suit, Mark 1 and compare it to the Avengers hero's nanotech suit in the game, a lot of things have changed, but it's not just the technology in the world of mcu animation technology that has

evolved

in our world, the real world. To make this suit possible on the big screen, something Marvel couldn't have dreamed of creating just 11

years

earlier, getting from here to here required a decade of innovation, 10 Marvel

movies

, and a lot of work on

movies

with no superhero in sight. picks up 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 from a cave, so what better way to make him look real than using a real man in a real metal.

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 sure CGI could convincingly create a full Ironman suit, so which came in handy for that first bulky cave suit. enlisted the help of Stan Winston's legendary studio, now called Legacy Effects, to make this 90-pound version of the Mark 1 with epoxy armor, flexible urethane leather, and aluminum, and for the project, Winston's team perfected a paint metallic chrome that would be used for other projects. Years later, the film had to rely on CGI for this section of the scene because the practical suit was too large for Robert Downey Jr. or his stunt double to move around, leaving the challenge of creating the first digital Iron Man.

The public in the suit would see the embassy in Vancouver. The achievement of it would not have been possible without the practical work of the Stan Winston studio. They modeled the digital suit closely after the real suit, even going so far as to ship pieces of the real suit to Canada. For reference, the digital version was so detailed that it even captures these markings and text textures, and to create a realistic metallic reflection, the embassy used the knowledge they learned working on car commercials to influence how they shaded the digital version of the suit. a lot about car paint, about clear coat, how light plays on cars, how they adapt to their env

iron

ment, which are essentially mirrors of their env

iron

ment, but that was just mark one, mark ii would have to be more elegant and refined and having a polished cape 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 are seeing here is completely computer generated, as with Mark 1 FX Studio's industrial light and magic movie.

For short he used that practical version of the suit as the basis for the digital version of him. The movie was so successful that when Favreau saw it he couldn't tell what was real from what was fake and we showed it to John and the Marvel team and they were like okay, well what parts did you replace and we thought we actually replaced everything without This early work on the first Iron Man that convinced filmmakers and the world of what VFX could do in the wild world of Marvel as we know it? It may not exist, but the true test of CGI would come with the most recognizable look of Iron Man Mark III.

This had to be perfect for the film to work and resonate with fans. I wanted to show them both that they could make the CGI character move the right way and that his metal armor matched Tony Stark's personality. Ilm had worked with shiny car surfaces on 2007's Transformers, which ultimately helped them nail the brand's outer shell. III made the suit look more like a shiny sports car than industrial metal. as Marvel initially planned we ended up saying you know what Tony Stark is he's a playboy you know he's rich he won't have an industrial forklift type suit he'll want a sports car suit the basic design was based on Marvel comics artist Adi Granov's iron illustrations of men, but one of the biggest challenges in replicating this 2D suit in real life was that the comic book version was designed with heroic proportions that don't match real humans, so they modified the model to have the shape of if there was a real human being 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 actual 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 start of iron man 2 motion capture technology had advanced a lot, making it possible for them to use a combination of practical suits and cgi.

Stan Winston's team built several practical versions of the Mark III suit that could be worn in pieces based on the parts of Robert Downey Jr that were seen on camera at the time when the rest of his body was often covered with a suit. motion capture that would later be filled in with cg suit pieces, this would help his performance as he didn't have to struggle under the bulk and weight of the full suit, the film used his custom motion capture technology called imo cap, which they had perfected 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 perfectly or else it would look wobbly and separate 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 in the spaces. in the middle, like the neck and joints, vfx artists really advanced 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 suits tracking, the rest of his suits are CGI and In this particular scene the movie didn't even need to use a tracking suit, they built the CGI suit 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 over the first film in Iron Man 2 was the shading or how the suit was lit. The film began 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-resolution photographs of the environment and using them as a guide for lighting. the suit with greater precision and ease. This ultimately helped Iron Man look even better, allowing them more time to focus.

The finer details meant we were able to speed up our process and spend a lot more time creatively making things look good rather than, you know, oh, does it look real or not? Not only did animation evolve as vfx technology advanced. but each new film also posed new challenges for story-based animators - for example, when it came to 2012's The Avengers, it was the script that drove how the character would be designed and animated, rather than hand-held thrusters. , Iron Man would have a rocket attached to the back of his suit, allowing 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 new way Marvel writers imagined what Tony's suit looked like.

The animators would be joining him for the first time and had to figure out how the inside of Iron Man's suit would work, something none of Marvel's visual effects studios worked on. They had to think a lot before we had to build many new interior pieces, such as figures. Figuring out what the technology inside the suit would look like when put together, this was particularly challenging as he walks the entire time while taking off the suit, a first film in the series that had to create models for each piece of the suit and track. individually with the movement of him and take a look at this battle scene with Thor on the top of the mountain.

Notice all the blue light. The small detail caused Weta Digital animators a major headache when it came to coloring Iron Man's suit. Marvel maintains a strict color bible. which keeps track of the exact shades that are supposed to be used in the various films, the brushed gold surface here was based on Weta Digital's work on the Lord of the Rings ring and they were able to recreate this color quite easily, but red on the other hand, is actually a red clear coat, which means that the red pigment itself has density and in addition, there are small metal chips suspended in that dense paint that can cause problems when mixed with light from the environment in this case the red and the blue turned purple, you know, one of the first things we ran into back then was that you take a suit like that and you put a blue light on it and it starts giving you strange colors, you start to want to go really burgundy, you know, kind of a berry color, balancing the color very quickly would end up being much easier and faster in later films, as weta develops a new advanced rendering technology that works 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 the car's paint look a little cooler or trying to make the lighting work a little better and not just trying to get rid of weird shadows. or strange colors, while previous films focused primarily on the movements of an individual suit. Iron Man 3 introduced a large number of new suits, around 20 in a single scene, each of which had to be animated in different ways. Usually, to animate Iron Man they used what is. It is called a puppet and there are a limited number of ways this puppet can move.

Sowetta developed new tools for his animators to use to alter the puppet's platform and increase freedom of movement so that each costume can have more character and style. We reorganized the entire process. to allow the animator to come in and take the high-resolution suit and, you know, with an how the suit grew. One of the challenges that comes with greater freedom of movement, however, is making sure Iron Man's metal plates don't collide with each other and figuring out where all the pieces go when he makes a move. simple movement like raising your arm, I think the main challenge we had in Iron Man 3 was the shoulders.

He had worn a huge shoulder pad, but it wasn't just these major battle scenes that were difficult, they often also had to spend time figuring out how he moved in more mundane scenarios that we first saw in Iron Man 3 scenes where he performs actions. very non-heroic like giving a massage or just sitting on a couch, it's easier to hide any mistakes and subtleties in a cloud of dust or debris depending on the movie, when you're not fighting with someone, every detail is there in the open iron man 3 It also had Tony Stark react and perform along with the suit ensemble for the first time, a step up from the traveling car wash scene in The Avengers.

As Marvel wanted an even more technologically advanced look, this was especially difficult according to the VFX Studio Trickster, as they had to combine rigid metal parts and flexible human body parts while making everything look perfect. 24 separate parts were first disguised as what he calls Trickster. Mysterious, amorphous pieces of technology unrelated to any distinguishable part of the suit, each of which would transform into the suit's familiar pieces as they flew toward him as the series

evolved

from the use of practical effects in Iron Man to a mix of practical effects and cgi to mainly cgi in later films.

Suddenly, the suit that was originally modified to be more human would now be modified to be more heroic again. We first saw subtle changes to the Avengers with their legs, some little tidbits that a lot of people probably don't know. Iron Man's legs are longer. Like a human's legs, his ankle would also have to be only an inch and a half wide inside the suit. Iron Man was also slimmed down a bit in the Avengers era of Ultron to give him more of a comic superhero silhouette, a little tighter waist, that sort of thing. a bit beefier around the shoulders, but the suit evolved once again in the last two films, forcing the animators to evolve as well and take a completely different approach to how the suit would be built and moved.

Tony Stark was now using nanotechnology, so instead of moving and tracking solid pieces like they did with the car wash scene and the scene in his workshop, they had to set up a whole new process.for the assembly of your suit. Nanotechnology involves multiple layers of simulations. A liquid metal simulation would transform into the target form because they wanted the transformation. to make it feel organic, but they had to make sure it still felt stiff and didn't stretch like Spider-Man's suit. The animators relied on precise shading. A technique used throughout the franchise to achieve this main visual trick is through shading.

It looked like metal every time Robert Downey Jr reportedly came up with the idea of ​​tightening Tony Stark's tracksuit before making the armor look similar to Spiderman's suit, which you can see here because it would be difficult for the material to form. a layer around loose clothing. If you look closely, the octagonal shapes come together to form the outer layer, while an inner layer of technology and circuitry built beneath it, Frame Shop actually created this multi-layered effect using animation tools from their work on the poltergeist of 2015 for the game, this nanotech suit evolved. a bit to be a little more rigid with pieces that lock into place more like the suit we saw in Captain America Civil War.

We took the lessons we learned from Infinity War and applied them to the end of the game, so it was actually the same technology, but we just had a better handle on it, although 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 latest cameo in Spider-Man Far From Home, this suit was also created by Frame Store and was actually based on the Captain America Civil War suit because It had a more solid look than the nanotech suit in Avengers in the game.

To make this suit, they took the same Civil War model and literally tore it up and destroyed it. and created the cut consisting of various cables and circuit boards using an early scene from Age of Ultron as inspiration. There is more detail on the top half of the suit because it is shown more closely on camera and to achieve the undead look first. They added Iron Man's signature metallic shine and then added the layers of dirt and rust. To be fair, the shoot is almost unrecognizable by the end of the process, so after 11

years

of development to perfect Iron Man's CGI suit, it was finally destroyed.

By utilizing advances 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 through the story. It wasn't like anyone had done it. I thought a person could wear powerful armor and it would look different than a guy in old night armor staggering around a stage that is so designed on so many levels that there is so much thought that goes into every little panel that moves it. You're intrigued and feel compelled to keep watching and find out what's going to happen.