Logan has a brotherly quarrel with Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. All images: Photo Credit: Twentieth Century Fox. X-Men Character Likenesses TM & © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved. TM and © 2009 Twentieth Century Fox Corporation. All rights reserved.

Originally, he was just one part of a major ensemble cast, but the character made such a strong impression on viewers in the first X-Men movie (2000) that he is now getting his very own feature film. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine (from Twentieth Century Fox), director Gavin Hood explores the troubled past of rebellious mutant Logan, his complex relationship with former team partner Victor Creed, his encounters with a series of outcast mutants and his conflict with Colonel Stryker, the man who ultimately turned him into a war machine known as Wolverine.

Fox enlisted Overall Visual Effects Supervisor Pat McClung and VFX Producer Greg Baxter to manage the ambitious vfx effort. When the shot count reached unexpected heights, just under the 1,000 mark, Additional VFX Supervisor Craig Lyn joined the team in January. Due to the late addition of extra shots, X-Men Origins: Wolverine ended up with a whopping 17 vendors. Hydraulx and Soho were lead vendors, Luma Pictures, Method Studios and Rising Sun Pictures worked on key sequences, while additional vfx were created at Matte World Digital, Frantic Films, Fuel, Lola, Hatch FX, Café FX, Cinesite, Cosa and Image Asylum. Cinedev, Persistence of Vision and Frantic provided previs services.

Lyn says that there was a tremendous amount of work that needed to get done in a very short space of time. "Also, some houses were better suited for specific types of work than others. In addition, there's always limited capacity in every house at any given time. So, that explains how the work was spread among so many different facilities."

Seventeen vfx houses completed work on X-Men Origins: Wolverine, including this carnival shot from Rising Sun Pictures.

X-Men Vets
Some 386 shots were assigned to Hydraulx, the only vfx company that had significantly contributed to all four X-Men movies. "Our main task was to recreate the Three Mile Island nuclear plant for the end sequence -- and then to partially destroy it," says in-house VFX Supervisor Erik Liles. "Initially, we received 3D geometries from another vendor, as the nuclear plant appears in three sequences that were assigned to different vendors. During the course of production, our sequence grew, and Hydraulx became the main vendor for that specific model, so we eventually became the driving force of how the model would work. We built the whole power generating plant, the island it is built on, and used matte paintings for the surrounding landscape and the sky. We couldn't actually get to the real location. So, we used photographs of the plant that we found on the internet, and also reference photographs of other facilities. What we ended up with was an amalgamation of multiple places. We also had to modify the environment and make the island much shorter -- one mile instead of three."

The nuclear plant environment plays a major role in the climax of the movie, when Wolverine confronts archenemies Sabretooth and Deadpool on top of one of the cooling towers. "For the hero close-up work, we used greenscreen elements of the actors performing the scene on a narrow 30-foot section of the cooling tower top in front of a greenscreen," Liles explains. "We then extended the practical set digitally and added the environment. For long shots, we used computer-generated doubles that were 100% hand-animated using Maya. Production gave us 3D scans of the actors, and we used that data to model the characters in extremely high resolution. The hair and costume were simulated using Maya."

The climactic confrontation ends with the disintegration of the cooling tower. In order to create a realistic collapse, Liles and his team (including Lead Dynamics Animator Josh Hatton) built a breakable tower that could be destroyed via a combination of techniques. "After watching several videos of cooling tower demolitions, we noticed two main things they had in common when they fell. It should be noted that we also looked extensively at building demolition, which was quite different, and used a lot of what we saw to augment the effect. First, these cooling towers had a very unique destructive behavior, folding in on itself rather than shattering. It was very reminiscent of a Styrofoam cup with some weight on it. Secondly, the overall collapse wasn't very interesting, with the whole tower basically 'falling' to the ground straight down as if the floor wasn't even there. There is also a large dust cloud at the base that essentially covers up all the cool stuff. We had been given direction not to 'cover up' the tower as it collapses, and we needed to come up with our version of what happens down under all that dust and smoke."