In this blog, I had to write an essay about a case study for VFX sequences. The minimal viable product of content has to last 2 minutes. The maximum duration of the video is 5 minutes. Here I had made a short video analysis on multiple VFX sequences from their respective scenes.
This sequence with the Razor Crest landed onto surface and the Mandalorian exiting out of the Razor Crest uses CGI on the ship as part of the process to breakdown of how the Razor Crest was made. The Razor Crest’s model is a medium-high poly model. As for the textures of the ship the first layer has rough textures with shadows to it the next layer after this comes the base layers (these textures seem to have normal mapping on them) and the last includes specular shaders and lighting implemented on the Razor Crest.
The VFX is clear in this sequence. How the sequence was set up must’ve been that they used some form of stage props to get the actor of the character, Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) to level the staging of how the Razor Crest was going to be placed. The stage props could’ve acted as a form of screening. Let’s have a look at how the Mandalorian is levelled onto the Razor Crest. With the screen aspect ratio at/of 21:9 it’s a little hard to tell where the footing is placed though how the Mandalorian walks out of the Razor Crest looks convincing enough to be realistic. In other scenes that use the Razor Crest, they can use different VFX elements. Tracking is an example in some of its scene: Here is a Razor Crest landing down toward surface at a station. The VFX used in this sequence has CGI, matte painting and tracking. As the razor crest lands on the station, we can see the breakdown providing us the layers that was used on the razor crest and station. We see that the station is round, I believe this is a form of matte painting and CG models. What they must’ve done here was that they added the CG models and matte painting into the volume and set it onto the virtual stage production set. By adding visual effects such as dust/sand particles from the wind of the ship making it look convincing that this is done in synchronisation. How exactly did they get the Razor Crest to fly down in order to land onto the station? As the CG model (Razor Crest) starts on the top and work its way down, they must’ve done a rendered shot with tracking on top of it. The tracking is rendered as the matte painting is present in real time. Why I mention this is the way the shot is executed. The focus point in the shot is the ship and that ship is tracked all the way through to the surface when it lands. I think the intended response here is that the scene itself was staged and the sequence was rendered for this scene. Because the Mandalorian uses a virtual stage production set. The scene was done in real time.
This scene uses the matte painting technique to create the land of that world inside of its scene. The VFX technique used in this sequence is matte painting and consists of 7 layers. The first layer is the base layer for the matte painting, the base layer helps builds the terrain and environment surrounding it from the ground up. The second layer adds hills, mounds and rocks onto the terrain, the second layer is used in this scene for the Mandalorian to ride on. The third and fourth layer consists of a few rocks added to the layer and the Mandalorian riding a creature travelling through the environment. Layers five and six add fog and lava elements to the environment with a couple of rocks. The seventh layer adds lighting and some shadows to the environment.
The reason why the matte painting technique is used in this sequence is to add visual trickery and the illusion of life for visual effects inside the Star Wars world of Mandalorian, it creates the environment surroundings in the scene. Furthermore, this creates world building as we watched the Mandalorian traverse the land. The scene is clear and sets up the environment well due to effective and genuine matte painting structure.