Making of -Dredd- 2012

DREDD (2012)

I worked on Dredd from late 2011 for about one year as a 3D VFX Artist.  I was the first 3D Artist on the show and was there until the last shot, so I was involved in creating most of the major CG elements in the film. Dredd was released in September 2012.

 

 

My first assignment on the show was to build the Atrium for the inside of Peach Trees. They basically shot 3 floors on set and the other 100 odd floors were CG. We had these fairly complex architectural blueprints of the layout which I then had to convert into a model, with no reference images at this stage.

 

Being the lead CG artist on the show at this point was great because I got to do my own designs for buildings to populate Mega City 1. I came up with these designs which we submitted to the client, some were approved and went on to feature in the film.

The film Dredd 3D is set 90% in a building called Peach Trees. I was tasked with creating Peach Trees hero model from concept reference, which would feature in over a dozen shots in the film. Some of these shots can be seen on my reel.

Here I was creating a CG overpass freeway that would sit over the live action plate. Quite tricky to match the designs given and make it fit in to the scene. As you can see the designs got more and more complex as I created different versions. Also I modelled all the buildings you see around the freeway in 3D, just to allow shadowing cast from the buildings on to the freeway.

I had to build a certain area of South Africa's Cape Town. I managed to find the area on Google street view and used that to help me build with great accuracy details that I never would of seen from only the shoot reference.

Creating digi doubles for the main characters in the film for use as mid/background assets in shots. Anderson/Dredd/Dredd on bike and some of the gang also. Painted using Mari.

The most complex CG freeway I had to do. This took weeks of work, and one of those that you are pleased to see the back of when its finished. Based on an image of a freeway in L.A. Never found the exact spot on Google earth in this one unfortunately. These were medium/high detail with road railings and lampposts. I created a second low res to pass on for massive simulation for the traffic. Buildings were then dropped in and arranged differently over time, per client feedback. The final shot can be seen on the trailer above.

 


Halls Of Justice was the second key location in the film, and I was tasked with creating this main hero asset model. On the image above-right is the concept we started out with. It looks quite different in the final shot in terms of what surface material we went for. It is suppose to be black marble on the main part of the building but I don't think that comes off  too well in the final shot.

From concept to, WIP, to final shot. This close up of Peach Trees was used to show the shutters closing when the building went into lockdown, as well as setting up the external skate area that Dredd and Anderson later escape on to.

In this scene Dredd blows in the door. A CG door was needed for the slow mo.

Creating CG models buildings/freeways and test positioning them. We rendered in Guerilla for this project.

I had to create an extended freeway, as the brief was for one a lot longer in the final shot. I made geo accurately over what was it shot. I projected the plate on to the geo, cleaned it up and used duplicate and snapping to make the freeway appear longer as you can see on the image on the right. Peach Trees and other elements like hanging cables between freeways were later added, as you can see in the image above and also trailer.