Eye candy: Chaos’s 2023 V-Ray VFX & Animation showreel
Chaos has posted its 2023 V-Ray VFX & Animation showreel, rounding up the best new work created with the production renderer for 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Houdini.
Below, we’ve picked out some of the highlights, with links to breakdown videos showing how they were created.
Digital Domain
As with previous V-Ray showreels, this year’s reel features a lot of nice work created by one of the biggest studios to use V-Ray in production, Digital Domain.
That includes clips of DD’s work on movies like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (see a breakdown video here) and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (see a breakdown here), and on broadcast series like The Last of Us (see a breakdown here).
But our favourite, at least in terms of the making-of (reviewers have been less kind about the series itself) is Disney+’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
The breakdown, embedded above, reveals how Digital Domain’s in-house performance-capture tools, Masquerade 2.0 and Charlatan, were used to transform 5’4” actor Tatiana Maslany into her 6’7” digital alter ego, while preserving the nuances of her facial performance – work for which the studio was nominated for a VES Award.
Other movie and broadcast VFX
Another key V-Ray user, Scanline VFX, also features extensively through its work on movies like Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, although the only breakdown video we’re aware of is the one above for Star Wars spin-off series Andor.
The reel also features work from Zero VFX, whose breakdown of its crowd simulations for music biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody can be seen here.
It’s also nice to see smaller European studios, including the Denmark-headquartered Ghost VFX – represented through its work on Slumberland (see a VFX breakdown here) and Star Wars series The Book of Boba Fett (see a breakdown here) – and the Czech Republic’s PFX, which has a VFX breakdown for historial drama series Medieval here.
Title sequences, commercials and motion graphics
Sadly, we haven’t turned up breakdown videos for any of the short-form projects featured on the reel, although you can see Elastic’s title sequence for Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in its entirety on the studio’s Vimeo channel.
The same goes for Capsule Studio’s recent games cinematics, which can be viewed in full on Vimeo, albeit without making-ofs.
The reel also features some nice work from smaller studios, including a52, AIO, Artjail, Frame 48 and Lunar Animation, which can be seen in detail on their respective websites.
Read more the 2023 V-Ray VFX & Animation Showreel on Chaos’s blog
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