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WRITTEN COMPONENT ENTRY Terminator Salvation vfx notes.

 The style of the film affected the visual effects; McG (Director) wanted a grittier and dirtier look for the film, which involved colour correction on elements such as matte paintings. To achieve the bleak, oppressive look of the film the matte’s were colour corrected to a desaturated mono-chromatic look.

For Sam Worthington’s character (Terminator, Marcus Wright) the vfx involved a complex mixture of live action, CG and prosthetics. The CG elements had to mesh with the live action seamlessly in a way that did not take did not take away from the performance of the actor. Worthington was applied with his makeup (prosthetic wound) and blue screen material where the 3D elements would be exposed. Precise data was taken when filming each scene, and the vfx crew would always film additional reference footage with 3 additional cameras, from 3 different angles.

The major challenge with the character was imitating the movements of the live action. This also involved 3D rotoscoping, followed by 2D tracking to refine and improve upon the 3D match-move animation. For each shot a matte of the wounds, keying and rotoscoping the digital blue portions of the live action makeup appliance. The matte is converted to a geometry outline, the outline was projected onto the 3D rotoscoped deforming mesh of the actor’s performance. The projected outline was used as the input for a procedural process in Houdini that modelled the wound edges ‘tearing open’ the deforming 3D mesh and revealing the CG endoskeleton.

Rising Sun Pictures approached the robot hand shots by using a provided physical hand model as reference. The live action hand was ‘painted’ out and replaced with the robot hand, which had been move matched.

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