Digital Domain additionally set up a new mental ray rendering pipeline. Traditional rendering methods for the cars would have taken 10 hours a frame. 

Meanwhile, Paris-based BUF Compagnie not only contributed to both days of the Casa Cristo rally (including starting line, arches, dunes and cortega finish along with the ice cave and Brandenburg finish), but also created the main city, Cosmopolis. This was fully recreated in 3D but shown through 2D processes. BUF was also responsible for the interiors of the futuristic-looking Royalton Industries building (including the tram ride, bizarre training labs for pilots and the vertical assembly line for the car factory). This was all under the leadership of CEO Pierre Buffin, VFX Supervisor Geoffrey Niquet and VFX Producer Simon Vanesse.

The studio's renowned camera mapping technique was used for the reconstructed environments such as the arches during the rally race. BUF's entire 3D pipeline relies on proprietary tools developed by its in-house R&D team. Post-production is also done on homegrown software at each stage, from modeling to rendering, including mapping.Specifically for Speed Racer, BUF developed a program that allows for 3D camera movements with 2D treatments. Also, animation of the cars was a mix between keyframe animation and simulation.

Santa Maria-based CafeFX, which handled the Fuji Lexicon race, had to grab so many people so quickly that it worked out of the Santa Monica office of sister division The Syndicate. "There was not a lot of time for experimentation," relates vfx supervisor John Van Vliet. "I always tell everyone that the most exhilarating and terrifying thing in a motion picture is a complete blank page, and this was certainly one of those moments. They gave us a fairly complete animatic, a book of sketches and some photos, which were their inspirations. This was originally a Digital Domain sequence, but they were pretty much up against it. They did some preliminary layouts and modeling work on the cars and we had to flesh it out and figure out what the actual construction of the track was and had to build the track. A big hurdle was road graphics. They had a very colorful concept but my concern was that it was so colorful that it would camouflage the color of the cars. And the other thing was that the way the graphics were created, as the cars went over and the camera would be on them, that there would be strobing and I was afraid of the reverse wagon wheeling effect.

"We took inspiration from some of their concept art and stretched it way, way out like a Polynesian tribal tattoo, which was in line with what their thinking was. And they went for it. So when the camera gets close to the road surface, it actually animates and snakes out and we were quite proud of that. Our concerns turned out to be correct with colors, and the cars disappeared in a lot of the earlier stuff, so our solution was to go back to the earlier part of the race and change the graphics to a dark blue and after we eliminate the cars we go back to a more colorful orange and red. Our main compositing tool was Fusion. And we also had to work in explosion work that had an animated feel. When we got into pyro stuff, they actually talked about doing old anime, so we brought in a guy with anime experience, Jeff Howard, who's done this, and we made beautiful anime explosions. But then they changed their minds and went back to doing it in CG in 3ds Max."

San Francisco-based Evil Eye Pictures was tasked with handling the opening school flashback, which provides the first glimpse of the exterior Speed Racer universe. The boutique was did an anime-inspired go-cart explosion during another flashback sequence with Speed and Rex in their garage.

However, the primary work consisted of the Rendezvous fight sequence shot on greenscreen. The World Team shot locations in a mountain pass, which were turned into matte paintings and then bubbles. "We were handed that and modified it quite a bit to use as main background," explains Exec Producer and Co-Owner John Jack, who collaborated with VFX Supervisor and Co-Owner Dan Rosen and VFX Supervisor and Co-Owner Matt McDonald. They had previously worked on key fights in The Matrix sequels, so this was a perfect fit. "We added CG snow and other graphics to create a power feeling through punches and kicks. A punch would streak through the snow and displace the snow as it went through it and leave a trail. That was a combination of 2D and 3D work. There was a lot of design work involved in stringing multiple greenscreen plates together because they wanted long, flowing shots that went from one section of the fight to another. We strung together eight or 10 different plates for some shots of individual people fighting and we basically zoom or snap pan or push through from plate to plate.