The Embassy's challenge with the exo-suit was integrating it well, having the moving parts interlock seamlessly and dealing with dirt, bullet hits and fragments falling off.

Interestingly, after they were ready for the shots, Blomkamp decided at the last instant that he didn't like the eyes were all wrong: they were too insect-like and wouldn't elicit the empathy that he was after.

"So at a very late stage we did a completely new face design and our creature supervisor, James Stewart, basically started sculpting something from a block of clay right then and there. And he built three small head sculpts in a couple of hours. And Neill picked one and we built it in CG. And that's the Christopher Jones you see in the movie." And through a series of digital interlocking plates, the eyes conveyed more emotion.

Meanwhile, The Embassy, having previously worked on Iron Man was busy with the exo-suit worn by Copley in his final defense. "The first Mach 1 Iron Man suit is an exo-suit in the same way, but this was a lot different for us and the sequence is much larger," recounts Embassy President Winston Helgason, who served as visual effects supervisor with Bob Habros.

"We got a rough model from Weta on the suit. It's a pretty detailed rig because there are so many moving pieces on it, interlocking bits of metal that open up when he gets inside and it closes up inside him. And it's really complex in the way it moves. You have to avoid intersections all over the place, and that's one of the difficult things you face with a robot. And then we spent a great deal of time texturing it in."

The Embassy team relied heavily on Luxology's modo because of its advanced UV mapping tools, 3D painting and texturing capabilities. modo's versatility was instrumental in doing look development for the exo-suit. "Because modo's renderer is so fast, we could quickly set up shaders and occlusion maps," adds artist Simon van de Lagemaat. "This was very helpful in simulating the dusty conditions on various parts of the exo-suit. We built some simple shaders and test-rendered it before moving it over to Autodesk Softimage XSI. It's great to go into the shading and rendering phase with a good idea of what something's going to look like."

As The Embassy's main modeling application, he says that modo integrates seamlessly into a pipeline that includes Autodesk Softimage, mental images' mental ray, Pixologic's ZBrush and Apple's Shake.

"I spent all of last July shooting the exo-suit sequence," Helgason adds. "We did HDRI recording the lighting on the set and tracking seven cameras to make sure the exo-suit was going to be integrated well because he's kicking up dirt all the time and a big thing also was the compositing of bullet hits on the exo-suit. This was originally going to be around 40 shots but that completely changed when it got back to editing and Neill and Peter requested more, so it became 100 shots that we turned around in three-and-a-half months.