Audiences definitely missed the simple pleasures of Fast & Furious' fast cars, hot women and Vin Diesel. © 2008 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.

By the looks of it, audiences really missed the pedal to the metal, nitrous-powered fun created through The Fast and the Furious film franchise. The third sequel in the series, Fast & Furious, reunited the entire original cast, including Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez for an amped-up event movie that debuted with an astounding domestic box office take of $70.95 million last weekend. Obviously director Justin Lin (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) found the right balance of cars, characters and eye-popping visuals that translated into box office supremacy.

And in achieving those visuals that couldn't be created practically, Lin went to some of the best vfx houses to craft sequences that pushed the limits of what the franchise has been able to achieve on film. Visual Effects Supervisor, Michael J. Wassel, a veteran of all previous Fast films, commissioned more than eight separate vendors to create elements or sequences for the film. VFXWorld spoke with two: Rhythm & Hues Studios and Double Negative (dNeg) about what they were able to achieve.

R&H was tasked with creating a realistic environment and fire elements for a film-opening gasoline truck and car chase. Rhythm & Hues/Universal Pictures.

Rhythm & Hues Studios: Flaming Trucks
Bob Mercier, visual effects supervisor for Rhythm & Hues Studios, was hired to blow audiences away with a death-defying flaming truck sequence featuring hijackers Diesel and Rodriguez. He explains, "The main technical challenge was to recreate the environment that the action takes place in because the second half of the sequence is entirely synthetic and is modeled after geography that has the flavor of the Dominican Republic but was completely designed by the production.

"The director was after a very specific and treacherous look to the environment," Mercier explains about the two minute-plus set piece. "He wanted the feeling of a runaway vehicle on a very steep downhill grade with absolutely no way for Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez's vehicle to escape. There had to be no way to pull off and nowhere to pull to the side of the road while the tanker flies by them, so it was a very specific design.

"We started with our art department doing concept paintings. We went back and forth with the director for several weeks. Once we had some approval, part of the original shoot took place near the grapevine off the 5 [freeway] near Pyramid Lake in California. We went to that area and took hundreds of reference photos so we could match the look of the vegetation and rocks from early in the sequence. Later in the sequence we are in a deeper rocky ravine, so we looked everywhere we could within several hours of Los Angeles for the right kind of texture reference. We ended up shooting rock faces off the Pacific Coast Highway just south of Oxnard. We used all of that texture reference together and built a 3D model of the environment and section by section, we texture mapped using projection textures."

Describing the projection process, he details, "We would have between eight and 15 cameras to project the images for each shot. There was the primary camera that we looked through, but to get the textures onto the geometry would require a series of projection cameras."