'Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' VFX Breakdown!

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings had a multitude of VFX houses producing over 2000 VFX shots, 1,761 of them made the final cut of a movie that broke the MCU movie cookie-cutter mold along with various box office records. Like the music in this video? I made it!
Support me by getting it on any of these sites :P

RodeoFX, Scanline, Trixter, Rising Sun Pictures, Digital Domain, Weta Digital, Fin Design + Effects, Luma Pictures and Method studios all combined their VFX superpowers to produce yet another Marvel blockbuster.

Rising Sun Pictures.
Rising Sun was given the mammoth task of creating the massive Ta Lo environment where a large part of the movie transpires and the digital jungle that would serve as a backdrop for the latter parts of the film.

The Ta Lo environment is approximately 75 square kilometers of jungle, mountains, lakes, and rice paddies whose look was based on southeast Asia.
RSP started by laying out a physical structure based on research they did on forested areas of Vietnam and East Indonesia and then built up a library of trees and flora based on their research, this included many different varieties of bamboo.

The team wanted the environment to feel completely natural despite being 100% CGI so instead of "hand picking" where to put a waterfall or lake purely for aesthetic reasons they decided to use procedural methods.

They ran erosion simulations to wear away parts of the landscape where water would naturally run and tree and plant density were dependent on whether an area was wet or dry and how much sun it received.
This method meant that vegetation appeared where you'd subconsciously expect it to, giving the environment a much more natural feel and allowing for happy accidents to occur much as they do with nature itself.

Trixter.
Trixter was given the rather awkward job of creating creatures based on Chinese mythology and making them look real whilst still maintaining their magical feel and they found themselves constantly battling to maintain the illusion.

There are some extremely strange animals on our planet but we accept them to be real because they are so detailed and realistic, Trixter had to create a fox with nine tails, a horse with scales and a dragon's face, and a creature with no face, four wings, and 6 legs! and, they had to make us believe they we real!
Funnily enough, the dragon-horse was the hardest to get right,
How does a fur-covered area on an animal transition into a scaley area? We don't know, no animal has both.
How do metallic teal scales react to light compared to hair? we don't know, no animal has metallic teal scales.

Abomination.
We last saw Abomination in the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk and since then he has continued to transform and now looks a lot like he does in the comic books.
Trixter combined concept art from marvel, the original asset from the 2008 film, and references they took from developments and changes Hulk has gone through since then and began to plan how each part of Abomination should look.
For his face, they tried blending the original 2008 asset with a 3D representation of the face of the actor who played Emil Blonsky in the 2008 film.

Rodeo FX.
Rodeo was planning to travel to Macau to shoot background plates and reference plates and get HDR's, scans, and photogrammetry, but then the pandemic hit, travel was restricted, and the only really viable option left to them was to create a fully CG Macau.
Making Macau.

First Rodeo had a question, How do you build a replica of a city when you don't have any data on its topography or geometry? they didn't know the answer, so they googled it!
"Google Maps" that is.
Using Google Maps, Open-Street-Map data, and photogrammetry tools they extracted a rough geometry of every building in Macau and used that data to populate an empty canvas, next they extracted the elevation and topography data and used it to displace the ground plane of that canvas.

Bamboo Scaffold.
Since the building used for the "Bamboo Scaffold" Fight Scene was going to be a CG "In-Construction" skyscraper, the team had to plan whereabouts in the city they were going to place it. Once they had its exact location nailed down they could then break down which of the neighboring buildings would need to be "Hero" buildings and which could be 2.5D Digital matte paintings.

For the Bamboo scaffold fight scene, the team created a rough mock-up of the scene and tagged every shot to its location on the building, this enabled them to determine which window the characters would emerge from at the start of the scene, over how many storeys the action took place, and which windows would be damaged.

[MPSmyles]

So much hard work done. I have watched the movie at least ten times, alone and with others.
This movie did not disappoint.

[kenkioqqo]

This movie is so amazing I have watched it more than five times. I recently joined this industry as a future 3D modeling, animation and VFX artist. Looking forward to being part of such an amazing project in the near future.

[k.ashutoshbaitharu]

It's amazing how they made it look real!

[daquan]

Good. This video makes me interested in buying this movie to watch.

[melissaharris]

Learning that they had to competly create Macau just reinforces my opinion that the Golden Dagger Club should have been located in fictional Madripoor.

[casquette]

Hey, love what you do, but you credited work done by Scanline to RSP. The two sequences in the bamboo forest, the first one with Tony fighting in the clearing and the second one with the gang in the car up to the cave was done by Scanline

[knightmare]

Loving the info! Fantastic work by all involved!

[gabewisniewski]

Giọng hát của ah Đức phúc hát đúng tâm trạng hay quá

[MCcreedLP]

Macau looks amazing but the forest part especially with the actors in front of it looks weird

[nic_galen]

oh come on you can't be serious by the thumbnail

[gamermixy.t]

I got a power that I can see what's real VFX now 😂 pfft

[JustWastedHoursHere]

I enjoyed this movie. The finale was a bit over the top, but overall an enjoyable watch. Now _Eternals_ on the other hand...

[dziubaty]

no es por el covid la escena de la ciudad, es que marvel reduce presupuesto, ya no precisan viajar, ya con deadpool esta demostrado, a parte que usan stagecraft. saludos

[solarveterok]

Слои и хромакей - решают если не всё, то многое.

[НурекеТоктасын]

Это очень круто удачи с уважением из Нуржан Казахстана

[Zainabkhan]

Man really you do some insane clickbait’s

[pablopaul]

Loved this film

Was so dissatisfied with the latest Thor
Mundane special effects, not much story line, and lame attempts at humour
I hope marvel can do better in Gen 4