the tool that makes War Machine suit look like it's actually there. It's a method that

started with a teapot and became ubiquitous. It's an essential part of a VFX film set,

but it's not a camera or a green screen. You have to search hard to see it in behind the

scenes videos. But this is not just a gazing ball that I bought for twenty dollars and

ninety nine cents. It's a key to making virtual objects look real.

In this scene, I was behind one of the pillars. My name's Leo Bovell, I'm a VFX supervisor

at Triptyc, been in the industry now for over 17, 17 years. So I've been at it quite a while.

In this scene, basically, Abraham, the statue and everything, we basically had to replace

it.

Obviously. Cut for them is like action for you in this situation. And you're like, I

have to scramble to get as many references as possible. Right between takes I get in

and I do as much as I can and then I get out of there. There are times where you can't

get in between takes because the creatives, they're in such a groove, they just got to

keep going.

One of the big problems VFX artists face in The Handmaid's Tale, Marvel movies, everything

is matching fake stuff to real light. And Leo scrambled in the real Lincoln Memorial

during the shoot because that information was crucial to create a realistic looking

Lincoln Memorial from scratch. As you can see in this BTS from Mavericks VFX. He used

an HDRI to figure out how to make it look so real.

A high dynamic range image. You might have an HDR option on your phone. It helps photos

to look less blown out in really bright spots. An HDRI captures data in a high dynamic range.

A normal photo might look like this.

You can't see anything, any detail or data near the sun or any trees in the shadows.

Using high dynamic range fixes that by meshing different exposures, different pictures of

a scene to let you see all the detail. Shadowy mush turns into visible trees and the sun

becomes clear again. Computer software can take that HDRI and use all that data to figure

out how light works in a scene. Make that a 360 degree panorama and you have enough

data to simulate the light in a mini world. Now you can add an object to that world and

it will look like the real light is hitting it with all the right highlights, shadows,

and reflections. HDRI is either use to light the object or is a reference for VFX artists

when they light it on their own, using manually added lights, making a bunch of tweaks and

adjustments. How does that HDR help you when you're actually off of this crazy shoot day

and you have to make something from it?

If we've captured the light on that day and then we take that light, we put it into the

computer, we get immediate feedback without trying to guess. The HDR really helps at the

stage where we are realistically applying shaders and materials to emulate the marble.

Getting an accurate HDRI really quickly is what causes all that scrambling on shoot days.

The first HDRIs actually used stuff like this: gazing balls, Christmas ornaments, anything

that was round and shiny and could help them get a panorama. The idea is that the picture

of the gazing ball gets unwrapped into a 360 degree picture when you put it in the right

software. I'm going to start taking some photos and that's going to help us capture all the

light in the scene and get it in this panorama. This reflective ball is one of three main

ways that people do it. Sometimes people will rotate their camera or use a lens that's really

wide. VFX supervisors like Leo might also use a 360 degree camera to snag these images

really quickly because they're in the middle of a hectic situation.

I use the Theta. It's a 360 camera and it's very small. So it's not intrusive. With the

Theta, usually it's a couple of seconds if you're doing a chrome ball. So you have to

set up a tripod, you have to put the ball down. That's a couple of minutes. This is

where the Theta makes all the difference in the world because it's such a tiny device

and you just plop it down and you get in and get out. When I'm just shooting bracketed

with the eight millimeter lens, probably a minute. Right between takes I get in and I

do as much as I can and then I get out of there. HDR is so mainstream now that I can

plop it into editing software and make an HDR photo.

I took some video without the chrome ball in it, so I put my 3D image in there. You

see, without the light, it looks fake. Add the HDRI though, and boom, suddenly it's like

it's there. Do you see the reflection of the trees or how the sun is glinting off of it?

Using a real environment to light a 3-D object started with work like this teapot. See the

windows reflecting in it? In the 90s, researcher Paul Debevec and colleagues pioneered the

creation of HDRIs from multiple images and then using those to light 3D scenes. Without

them, back in the late 90s, it was a lot harder. As his paper says, currently available techniques

for realistically rendering synthetic objects into scenes are labor intensive and not always

successful. They had to position lights, copy reference photos and program in reflections.

People still have to do some of that. But you can also let HDRI light objects in your

scene. Today, repositories of HDRIs let you download images and simulate thousands of

environments, like an old room or outside a small cathedral. This lighting often still

comes from a ball like this one, but VFX artists don't use that extra time just to chill out.

They used to work harder.

As a person who's thinking about light like exponentially more than the normal person,

would you rather hang out with Rembrandt or Newton?

Maybe Rembrandt, but ultimately, if I if I threw another name in there, it would be Degas.

Why Degas? Because he was just obsessive about his artwork, him constantly chasing perfection

is something that I think drives a lot of artists and also intrigues me at the same

time.

It is a national monument slash park. Because of that, we couldn't limit the public from

entering the space. It was an insane day. I mean, you had fans who showed up on the

day. You had some people who thought it was a protest. So they showed up. Again, they

couldn't close the set, so people start to actually sneak in to some of the shots and

pose, because on the day we had about roughly one hundred and fifty actors. So you had a

couple of fans started to sneak in. But obviously their their outfits, their garments, something

just looked off. So sometimes some of them actually got into the shoot and it was like,

wait a minute, something's off here. Let's get you out of here.