Andrés Arias

War of the Worlds VFX story is fascinating — not the three month marker all of Hollywood used after this — but the techniques they used to get it done. 1. The bridge simulation with lower resolution blocks for basic animation and later refinement — not how most of us were thinking at the time about Rigid Body Simulaton. 2. Layering cards of destruction elements in 3D compositing instead of full 3D builds — obvious now, but 3D comp was only just introduced in consumer level software a year earlier. 3. Headlight elements on 3D vehicles were actual photographed headlights, tracked to the scene by sharing cameras directly from animation with compositing — no commercial package had built that in, but ILM was doing so since Attack of the Clones. “Cheating” with the lifted element was clever. 3. The camera array driving scenes were a masterclass in how to properly build driving plates with 3D tracking. It was not the first time it had been done, but the BTS informed us all on best practices. 4. The 3D crack method with layered simulation scale voronoi noise is emulated to this day. 5. “Dusting” the victims of alien death rays was not some special, amazing 3D simulation — as is all the rage these days — but clever compositing, and very effective. Inspirational clever work at every stage on this one, not just brute force ILM power, that made a lot of our minds expand.