How ILM built
with Katana, Mari & Nuke
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.
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.
Katana’s multishot workflow abilities enabled the team to scale up easily, with sequence-level working boosting efficiency.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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