While there were numerous exciting moments in Marvel's Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, one of the most prominent was the opening sequence. A mid-air scene in which Batroc and his "leapers" try to escape Sam Wilson's titular hero ensues, with a canyon providing the perfect landscape for the sequence.
Although the setting for the battle takes place in the Libyan desert, the canyon in the scene doesn't actually exist. When we recently spoke with VFX Supervisor Charles Tait (The Lord of the Rings), he gave us some insight into the process of building that landscape entirely from scratch.
It seems as though height maps were essential, as Weta utilized satellite data of the Pariah Canyon in Arizona and Utah and mixed them with the maps of the Libyan desert to create a canyon that would work perfectly for what the writing team had in mind for the chase.
Literary Joe: So the canyon environment is entirely CG. Did you use shots that they gave you of what they wanted the canyon to look like, or did you study any specific canyons and actual land formations to inspire how you brought that to life?
Weta Digital: Well, it is based on a real canyon. It was made from height maps, like satellite data, from Pariah Canyon, which is in Utah and Arizona, and the surrounds all around it are height maps of the Libyan desert because the scene was supposed to take place there.
The Pariah Canyon was perfect for us because it starts very narrow and ends up wide. And that gives us a really nice staging for our sequence. They fly into the narrow slot at the beginning, and towards the end, it widens out into the wider desert where you see Torres at the end with his Jeep and Falcon landing.
We started with that heightmap, and we make a model from that, which gives us not simple terrain; it's very big. And in world units, it's a pretty huge thing, but it doesn't really have enough detail. But this is a good place to start because it's natural and organic and a real canyon. If you try to make that from scratch as a model without really looking at real-world data, it'd be very hard to make it look supernatural in terms of the flow and shaping.
We'd use that, and we'd stage all our animation on our shots in that canyon and this low res model. And then, once we're happy with the way our shot's looking in terms of what the camera's seeing, we would then detail out that section of the low res model using a much more high res geometry.
And we had these rocky pieces, like sections, columns, chunks, and those would all be inserted into the low res model to create all that extra geometric detail. So, really the canyon was all CG, but it never really existed as a whole. It was always very detailed, right where the camera's looking. So each shot had basically its own model of a canyon.
Could you tell that the canyon was completely rendered? Let us know your thoughts in the usual spot, and be sure to check out the full audio interview with Weta Digital's Charles Tait on Literary Joe's Inner Child Podcast below!
All six episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are now streaming on Disney+.