Thought Batman’s sonar was cool in The Dark Knight? Wanna know the breakdown of the visual effects that made this possible? Click the jump to see more.
BUF Studios has worked on The Dark Knight visual effects throughout the movie, and truth be told it was amazing! BUF Studios has worked a lot of recent work such as Life of Pi, Total Recall, and Dark Shadows. Kudos, to BUF Studios and their amazing skills here’s a bit of what they planned for The Dark Knight for the visual effects of Batman’s sonar:
BUF also designed the environments in which the “Spy Vision” is used. This wave animation plays a key role in the Prewitt building
sequence, where Batman uses it to locate hostages. The device is also featured in the Batcave monitor room, where dozens of monitors visualize different locations — an environment reminiscent of the Architect Room that BUF created for The Matrix Reloaded. The first step was to build each environment by modeling layers upon layers of geometries, because in Spy Vision, all volumes are translucent except when hit by a wave. “We had to see across the rooms all the way through, including the city in the background with traffic in the streets, etc.” Vidal remarks. “It was amazingly complex. And we had to do it for each one of the monitors in the Spy Vision scenes in the Batcave. It was a very detailed for something that was only meant to be part of the background, each screen had to show people with phones doing different activities. In order to get enough material, we filmed our families, our apartments, our offices, etc., using BUF’s proprietary pipeline to shoot references for the key frame animation. The amount of work that those Batcave monitor room shots required was insane!”.
See the clip below of the development.
The Dark Knight | Visual Effects Making Of from BUF on Vimeo.
Finally, BUF had to prepare the shots to be rendered for IMAX resolution. This unique requirement added an enormous challenge to a project that was already very challenging. VFX are usually created at a 2K resolution but full IMAX resolution exceeds 8K x 6K, with a single uncompressed frame representing around 200 Mb of data. BUF treated IMAX resolution at either 5.6K or at 4K anamorphic, depending on the shot. 3D renders and 2D elements were created at one or the other of these resolutions. “It is much heavier to handle, but in the end, you really obtain a quality that clearly sets the movie apart from anything that one can see on a DVD at home,” Vidal notes.
Amazing work by BUF Studios. You can follow these guys on their website, see the source link below.
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Source- BUF Studios