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Avengers?

How can you possibly stop me?

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Hi, Mike Seymour from FXGuide.com, for Wired.

The Avengers return in Age of Ultron.

We visited ILM in San Francisco

to talk to the team behind the Digital Ultron,

and of course, the Hulk.

It was a good opportunity to build

on what they'd done on the first Avengers.

Hulk was well realized in that film, for sure.

But the challenge coming into this was okay,

well how can we improve upon it, you know?

Make it better.

We pretty much rebuild him entirely.

ILM developed a new approach to facial animation

and muscle system that involved a sub-mesh

on top of the muscle shapes.

More like a fascia skin layer.

Interestingly, Mark Ruffalo was given a monster mirror

preview setup which used a laptop and a camera,

and allowed him to do a real-time marker-less

facial tracking system to a real-time model of the Hulk.

This allowed him to experiment with the character,

and prepare for his on-set performance.

The system literally showed a Hulk version of Mark,

back to Mark in real-time.

Some of the motion captured was done with Ruffalo

prior to the shoot, and some was done on set

with a helmet cam and gray suit

so that Mark could interact with the other Avenger actors.

In this scene with Black Widow,

Mark Ruffalo actually wore cricket gloves

so that Scarlett Johansson had something

roughly the right size to touch.

Well I think we paved the ground with Avengers One.

It was very well-received, in terms of his performance,

and his believability.

We took that as a challenge of we could make it better.

We revamped the entire model, including the facial shapes,

and really kind of matching the intent

that we saw from Mark Ruffalo when he was on set,

or pushing it to where Joss needed to

for the comic action beats.

We explored definitely making it more in that comic realm.

We pushed how far he could open his jaw.

It's almost, well it is dislocated in some cases.

As with Avengers One, ILM needed to build a digital Hulk,

and a digital Mark Ruffalo.

With ILM using an approach started

with the Davy Jones character in the Pirates movies

to the facial animation.

That is to say the animators would visually match

to Ruffalo's performance, but then ILM would run

an automatic simulation over the top.

This would provide the right kind of flesh sim

and movement, the inertia for the Hulk.

Mark Ruffalo was on set,

but the team also had a body builder, Rob de Groot,

who was painted green for lighting, and muscle reference.

Initially Hulk was actually planned to turn gray

when he's angry Hulk in the Hulk buster sequence,

but hey, everybody wanted the green guy.

So in the end, ILM just changed his eyes

to make them look more sullen

when he's under the control of Scarlet Witch.

Well please subscribe for more behind-the-scenes action.

I'm Mike Seymour, for Wired.

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