After completing work on Watchmen, we moved onto a new project called “Surrogates”. As with Watchmen, this project was also based on a graphic novel, although Surrogates would not follow the graphic novel to the same degree.

I took care of look development of the main visual effects elements that we created on the show. The fist was the severed arm of Bruce Willis’ surrogate body, including the fluid that leaks out of the stump. I used various different materials on the layers that made up the interior of the arm, and matched the skin to that of the actor.

Although only appearing in a small number of shots, the Chinooks in the movie are completely cg. I worked closely with the modeling and texture artists to create the most realism possible in order to sell this as a full screen effect. Using the many images of real Chinooks that we sourced I set about matching the materials as closely as possible. In order to keep the highest realism I used various techniques such as point based color bleeding (to get indirect lighting - bounced light), HDRI lighting with bent normal occlusion, and extensive use of ray-tracing for reflections, blurred reflections, soft shadows etc.  This was obviously quite slow to render, but the limited number of shots it appeared in allowed me to take this approach. I also handled the lighting and compositing of most of the Chinook shots.

Along with the Chinooks was another helicopter build, this time it was Bruce Willis’ “Astar” chopper that crashes in the human zone.  I did some lookdev work on this too, mainly to get a multi-layered paint look for the body.

On the show I also completed many other elements for shots, such as fx element lighting, banners, plate cleanup and compositing matte paintings. I did lots of work developing the surrogate death fx too.