Weta Visual Effects Supervisor Sean Walker Breaks Down The Process Of Bringing Dragons To Life In ‘Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings’

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For Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, VFX supervisor Sean Walker, along with his team at Weta, was tasked with bringing the Great Protector and the Dweller-in-Darkness to life. “The most challenging part with these insane, massive, mystical and mythical creatures, is that the human mind knows that these things can’t possibly live,” says Walker. “They can’t possibly be real, so everything that we do has to make it feel like you can touch them.”Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings follows Shaun (Simu Lu), whose real name is Shang-Chi, as he confronts his past when the Ten Rings organization, run by his father Xu Wenwu (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung), comes for him.

Along with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) and his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), he returns to his mother’s homeland to protect them from the Organization and stop them from releasing a great evil.Below, Sean Walker gives a breakdown of how Weta created the Great Protector and the Dweller-in-Darkness for the film.“There’s a combination of a few programs we use,” Walker says. “The first image was rendered in Houdini and Mantra.

We animate the creatures with a combination of Maya puppets and our proprietary Loki puppets, which is a tool we use at Weta.

For the most part, the animators use Maya and our effects artists use Houdini.The first one is actually kind of a proxy version of the dragon and the Dweller that our effects artists use.