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How ILM built

Ultraman: Rising

with Katana, Mari & Nuke

Ken-Faces-GIF Ami-Faces-GIF Prof-Faces-GIF

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) recently scooped a 2024 HPA (Hollywood Professional Association) Award for Outstanding Visual Effects on Ultraman: Rising — its first animated feature since 2011’s Rango. Produced in collaboration with Netflix and Tsuburaya, the film has a distinctive, stylized look. To create the project’s unique visuals, the studio turned to Foundry’s Katana, Mari, and Nuke to power its pipeline. 

We went behind the scenes with Visual Effects Supervisor Hayden Jones, Lighting Supervisor Oliver McCluskey, CG Supervisor Katherine Roberts, and Lead Compositor Sandra Chocholska to find out more.

In numbers.

1600 shots 100+ character builds
1000+ individual assets and props 100+ unique sets

“From surfacing in Mari, through lighting in Katana, all the way to the final composite in Nuke, we were able to really control the art direction of the entire film.”

Hayden Jones, Visual Effects Supervisor, ILM

Lighting Ultraman’s Japan with Katana.

 
Keeping shots consistent

With a huge amount of data to deal with, ILM used Katana’s templating for clear, shareable setups to ensure consistency between artists working across three sites.

 
Working efficiently, at scale 

Katana’s multishot workflow abilities enabled the team to scale up easily, with sequence-level working boosting efficiency.

 
Dealing with complexity

Katana’s deferred loading capabilities enabled the team to hide some of the complexity of the shots so that they could focus on just the areas they were working on.

“The great thing about Katana is you can limit the stuff that you need to see. When you're dealing with that kind of data, it's very handy to not have to look at it all. We can work on the pieces we want to work on.”

Oliver McCluskey
Lighting Supervisor, ILM

Texturing with Mari.

 
Importing brushstrokes

Using Mari, the team was able to import the brushstrokes that the art department had used in their original concept designs, creating an authenticity to the surfacing work.

 
Producing helper passes

The team produced helper passes in Mari so that the Compositing team could apply these to every single shot in Nuke, defining the look of crucial details, like the highlights in Ken’s hair.

 
Recreating manga techniques

The team used Mari to utilize the ILM texture library and recreate a manga technique where posterized images are acheived by repeatedly photocopying the image to simplify the detail.

“What we were able to do with Mari was take something that we traditionally use for very, photoreal texturing work and do something completely creative.”

Katherine Roberts
CG Supervisor, ILM

Bringing it all together with Nuke.

 
Dealing with scale

Nuke’s flexibility gave the team the level of control they needed for working with thousands of individual assets and props from different teams and programs.

 
Creating new tools and unique 2D visuals

ILM created multiple stylized manga-inspired 2D frames entirely in Nuke, and also developed the Kurihara Filter for a painterly look, plus a new Crosshatching tool.

 
Deep Compositing

The team used Nuke’s Deep Compositing to add anime-inspired speed lines to characters, and also to add detail to the highly complex Tokyo Tower scene.

“For the wider shots, 
we used a lot of comp-generated steams and atmosphere. With the deep data we had, we could extract points and then put cards in the exact places where we wanted them to be. That was really crucial to embedding the atmosphere in the correct spots.”

Sandra Chocholska,
Lead Compositor, ILM

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