The most visible vfx challenge on Watchmen was the all-CG Dr. Manhattan. All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. ™ & © DC Comics.

Zack Snyder's Watchmen is a far cry from 300. It had to be in order to achieve such gritty realism, with 200 sets built in Vancouver and as much in-camera work as possible before resorting to CG. And yet vfx technology made it more affordable to pull off this physical spectacle, with 1,100 shots (a quarter of which were CG) divided among such vendors as: Sony Pictures Imageworks, Intelligent Creatures, MPC Vancouver, CIS Hollywood and Rising Sun Pictures.

Dr. Manhattan, of course, is an all-CG creation that couldn't have been achieved five years ago. So is Doc's Mars sojourn, with his perfectly constructed Glass Palace. And Ozymandias' Karnak in Antarctica also relied heavily on CG. And Rorschach's inkblot-stained mask demanded a fair amount of animation as well. Plus all of the intricate layering of pop cultural information (particularly in the main title sequence that sets up the history of the masked superheroes from 1939-1985) required some deft CG enhancements, too.

For the bloody alt-reality Vietnam sequence, Sony Pictures Imageworks had Dr. Manhattan cresting a hill and blowing up Vietcong from the inside. Courtesy of SPI.

Tricks for Dr. Manhattan, Mars & Vietnam
Not surprisingly, the majority of the vfx revolves around Dr. Manhattan. Thus, with its 400 shots, Imageworks served as the lead vendor, under the supervision of Pete Travers (Click, Zathura). "We did everything associated with Doc," Travers explains, "including the Martian environment, the Glass Palace, the destruction of New York City and [the rapid victory in] Vietnam."

Travers adds that it was "a dense 400 shots." In other words, there were no easy ones. "I came on in the summer of 2007. DJ [DesJardin], the overall visual effects supervisor, approached us and after reading the graphic novel, my first reaction was, 'We gotta do Doc!' DJ already had discussions with Snyder about the approach as a CG character that emits its own light, and I just reinforced that view.

"So a lot of it stems from theories that were successful or unsuccessful. But they wanted an actor in frame that the director could work with to frame the performance and then, with a low footprint on set, we could capture that performance. It quickly threw out any conventional motion capture techniques. The design of the suit had multi purposes: it was a capture suit for Billy [Crudup] with tracking markers and dots on his face, but the main purpose was to serve as a light source. We called it 'above the line lighting', with Billy serving as a blue light for everyone. He was such a strong light source for scenes that [DP] Larry Fong had to be onboard with it. Chris Gilman [founder and president] of Global Effects built the suit based on a lot of the specs that we came up with. Billy was covered head to toe with these LEDs and he wore a helmet and it gave a strong light throw in the environment. We talked about trying to get that in post, but we never would've made it look as good as it turned out using the LEDs because of the hue and hue changes, the way the light reflected and the small pieces of glass going everywhere. The advantage of shooting it in frame was they got all the light for free."

Imageworks used Maya for the character animation and texture painted in BodyPaint 3D. Houdini was used for procedural animation. 

But maximizing the performance and preserving as much as they could in CG was the most significant achievement. Everything was in context with the other actors. During the capture sessions they used up to four Sony F900 witness cameras in conjunction with the high-speed film camera as a tracking source along with Travers' own separate video assist. He admits that it was somewhat similar to ILM's Davy Jones for the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. "No matter what method you use, animators at a certain point have to dive in and make it look right," Travers maintains. "We had to make sure that Billy and the other actors were not encumbered by us. It was a case of where ever we could find a spot." Then they brought the data back to Sony, matchmoved all of the footage and constructed the scene from that.