Star Wars: The Last Jedi

The bulk of Jellyfish’s work for The Last Jedi consisted of CG set extensions. The team at Jellyfish built on the scale of the film, ensuring that it added to the scope and beauty of the sets already captured. This lead to a lot of extension work involving interior meeting exterior, corridors and structures in the bigger ships and hangar environments.

Our team also handled the seamless integration of holographic key characters in to final shots. This called for precise coordination of the hologram animation and how these sat amongst the props and actors. The holograms were simple lighting renders of the huge full models from ILM, these needed to look solid and not x-ray, with some passes added with normals, occlusion and curvature for comp to be able to emphasise the shape and detail.

In addition to ensuring the scenes and shots were finished to the highest of standards, there were other shots where it was Jellyfish’s role to add to the drama, these included fire, explosions or atmosphere. The 3D team fully embraced the chance to show off some fluid animations and bigger simulations in Houdini.

Our CG team were tasked with pyrotechnic and water simulations in Houdini and Maya respectively. For the pyrotechnic simulation we were matching to practical elements and simulations from surrounding shots, producing a directable fire/smoke for the Torpedo Run and Bomb Run sequences. These were done in Houdini and rendered in Mantra.

The water simulations were for a comic relief moment when Finn is walking around, and his medical suit becomes detached and little jets of water squirt out of it. These were meshed nParticle sims in Maya.