Iloura is back with its fiery work as it raises the bar with Fume fx. All images: ©Copyright 2012 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.

In the 3-D sequel, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a darker vision was embraced more in keeping with the Marvel comic book character, as Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) hides out in Eastern Europe to foil the devil's plan to take on a human guise.

Jenny Fulle's Creative Cartel (Priest) once again took on the role as VFX hub. "We had a much grittier feel with this Ghost Rider," she confirms, which is evident in the look and tone. "For us, the biggest challenge was, of course, that they wanted to go stereo on this. How are you going to deal with conversion on a flaming ghost rider head that's close to camera in the shot? So we had to come up with some creative approaches for that and we came up with our hybrid pipeline, which I'm very proud of and I think serves the movie really well."

Because fire is so difficult to convert well along with all the other transparent effects, Fulle embraced a hybrid approach by getting their anchor conversion facility (Gener8 3D) and VFX facility (Iloura) together early on to figure out a way to render the shots natively. "We ended up by sending plates off to Iloura and they would do their matchmove and roto, clean up the plates and then send that off to Gener8, where they would convert," Fulle continues. "Then they would send the left eye and right eye along with the cameras to Iloura, where they would render stereoscopically. So 500 of our Ghost Rider shots are literally rendered in stereo. They're truly native stereo shots except for the backgrounds. But it really worked because everyone was terrified on paper but we got into a great groove and I can't imagine doing it any other way at this point. But you have to be willing to make commitments earlier than some filmmakers might want to because we're turning over sequences that are going into visual effects and conversion now, so changes to those sequences become a little more challenging to manage.

Illoura's hell truck was one of the customized highlights for 3-D.

"But financially there are benefits because you're not having companies doing duplicative work, which often happens with conversion and visual effects -- they both have to do matchmove, they both have to do roto -- but we shared all that and, again, the great benefit is we're rendering natively in 3-D."

They wanted to be immersive but also mindful of the style of shooting by directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, which is very quick and action-packed. When they needed to they played it safe and shallow and, whenever possible, they pushed it back to provide more depth.

As for the VFX, Australia-based Illoura raised its game for the Ghost Rider sequel. Their signature fire and smoke are the highlight along with lots of environment work. There's a large strip miner in a quarry that Ghost Rider takes control of, which becomes a hell crane. The quarry becomes mostly intense CG.

Getting the look and feel of the new fire for Ghost Rider was one of the challenges.