Blender Used in Previz for Captain America: the Winter Soldier
FXGuide is featuring a story on VFX production in Marvel’s new movie ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’. Blender has played a small role as well!
FXGuide writes:The building crash also featured shots of Wilson running to avoid a debris field of glass, furniture and dust. Proof helped previs this sequence. “I had no idea how we were going to crumble the building on a previs scale to sell the idea,” says Granito, “but one of our artists developed a cool way of doing it.”
He brought the shots into Blender – normally we work in Maya – and created a simulation where you could just drag the Helicarrier into the building at different angles in realtime and see how the pieces would crumble and how the entire wall would give way. And once the previs was approved, we handed off a techvis to the second unit director, and used our debris field for how that scene was shot.
Hat tip to Kanishk Chouhan for spotting this!
Update: the video below contains the mentioned shot. I can’t confirm this actual footage is done in Blender though:
Thats awesome! THanks for sharing.
Nice! I follow fxguide regularly and listen to a lot of their podcasts and never heard blender mentioned once, but that is pretty cool that Blender has a place in the pipeline of big budget blockbusters.
Nice to see Blender here and there being used also inside some bigger projects like with the spiderman story boarding.
What is really interesting is that they used Blender and not something different and I assume probably because how fast it was to set-up a mock-up scene.
I use Blender for my product design a lot as a digital way of model making instead of going into more precise CAD apps directly.
I was there for the filming of Captain A. Fun time. Cool to see blender was used for previs. It’s becoming more common for previs in a lot of movies today. I’m sure the only thing holding it back from being used more fully as actual fx software is the fact that it has no software support. Studios don’t want to take a chance. I think if studios started adapting it to be their own propriety software by adjusting the source code to their specific needs, it would be used more.
Previs-Generalist-Blender goes together very well,
I work in this industry and can say that Blender is used quite a lot more than you here about, for three reasons.
1. The vendors of Maya and other software have marketing departments that make sure everyone knows when their software is used. Blender does not.
2. Studios do not want to give away the secrets of their pipeline.
3. There is a big mix of software in use. Since you hear so much from the big marketing machines and so little from the open source projects (often because the open source projects themselves are unaware that their product is being used), you assume that it’s only the ones you hear about.
I cannot provide specifics about what is being used on what, but I can say that Linux and the open source toolchain are huge in this industry.
while this is cool (although I’m not going to watch another superhero boring film full of CGI) I think we are missing the point a little. Blender doesn’t need to be used by the film industry. It was made for YOU! (and I for that mater) and that’s it’s only purppose. Thats the main thing why Blender is soooo great!. There’s no need for a debate on how Blender could be used more in Hollywood.