Game of Thrones s6e9: 'Battle of the Bastards'

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Battle of the Bastards

Heya - sorry this isn't really 100% game art or a WIP, but Polycount has always sorta been my home so i figured i'd share it here. Please be gentle admins!


Recently i had the privilege to be part of the Iloura VFX asset team that was responsible for the Battle of the Bastards/Winterfell sequence in episode 9 season 6 of game of thrones.
You can see some breakdowns here in the VFX Promo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBq8E6dv7-4

EDIT: Official Iloura breakdown reel here! 

Sorry for the crappy quality images, hopefully i can post more (hires) shots/breakdowns here as we're allowed (these things are always super slow to get authorised and nobody wants to annoy HBO!). I'll also try drag some of the other Iloura polycounters in and have them pimp their specific assets. Watch this space

The team was quite small and all assets were touched by multiple people at various stages (especially horses/digi-doubles), so i'm hesitant to claim any one asset  as 'mine'. It was genuinely a team effort.

My personal responsibilities included asset modelling/texturing/shading, Massive (the crowd engine, not the size) characters and props, dirt and blood passes, fx+interaction geo,matte painting/integration and breaking the render farm during crunch.

If you guys have any specific shot breakdowns you'd like to see, i'll try wrangle them and dump them as we're allowed





 










Impossibly huge thanks to Iloura. Their team is awesome, the amount of expertise, pipeline, attention to detail - everything. Kinda dizzying that i got to play a tiny part. 

Words can't describe how cool it is to see other people enjoying something you've worked so hard on. It was pretty emotional seeing it all there in the context of the episode. Just...awesome. I hope everyone here gets the chance to experience something similar.

Cheers!

Ps. Would be kinda cool to see a Greentooth in there somewhere :>

The Rizzler

If I'm going to be the first to comment, then I guess I'll say I'm probably not just speaking for myself when I say that battle scene has to be one of the best put to film, as in part indicated by the 10/10 rating for the episode on imdb, for one. The sheer chaos, the terror of the crush and pulling off presenting such a large scale battle, including long takes, completely overshadowed the earlier scene with the dragons in my opinion (no offence to the vfx team that worked on that scene, since the dragons look better than they ever have).

There's not much else to say I think, so if I could humbly congratulate Iloura for the great effects and congratulate you for getting to be a part of it all!

AtticusMars

Couldn't agree more, easily the best battle scene I have ever seen in either film/tv. Everything about it from the fx, choreography, camera work, tactics... all incredible.

One question about your screenshots though: Why the skeletal horses in the 7th image?

gfelton

My absolute favorite scene in all of the show, blew me out of my seat watching it! Which assets on screen can you say you got to work on specifically? They all looked so real I honestly thought they were actors in costume. Well done!

lotet

Like everybody else already mentioned; the one shot following Jon in the battle is probably one of my favorite battle scenes ever. I literary had to pause and re-watch it again before I could keep going. absolutely stunning.  I can not believe so much of it was CG, I was 100% sure that most of it was actors comped in with some CG blood and arrows.

amazing work, congratulations.

moof

Everybody I talk to talks about how amazing this scene was, how authentic and powerful it was. You guys did some masterful work here, and besides the effectiveness of the cg, was the effectiveness of the story telling you did with that cg. Amazing work ! 

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AtticusMars said:

One question about your screenshots though: Why the skeletal horses in the 7th image?

It was part of the Variety VFX breakdown - as the scene played out the horses were stripped back layer by layer to show how they worked (full textures/flat displacement/muscles and rig/skeleton). Its sort of the guys over in comp flexing a bit :pleased:

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gfelton said:

My absolute favorite scene in all of the show, blew me out of my seat watching it! Which assets on screen can you say you got to work on specifically? They all looked so real I honestly thought they were actors in costume. Well done!

Thanks! It's a little difficult to claim things, the way the pipeline works is a 'finished' asset might be waiting for review for a few days (during which time the original artist will move onto something else). When director or CG supervisor give their feedback, i might be the only artist available so i'll fix it up or redo it the way it needs to be done for that shot. Even if i did 60-70% of that asset, the concept of ownership is still a bit blurred. The more work on an asset, the more likely it is that multiple people have touched it. The digi-doubles and horses, for example.

Assets that i know i did a majority of work on: Tormunds sword, a ton of wilding/bolton weapons armor and shields, the Bolton 'flayed man' shields (that formed the shield wall), various body parts that scattered the battlefield, The longspears, inc those sticking out of Wun Wun, matte paints of the battlefield, matte passes adding frost to trees and basic skyline replacements, a LOT of fx geo (the flying blood has to collide with something :P) + a load of smaller assets. Also did corrective blends for the horses, and was part of the team working on the digidoubles/massive characters.  

Chimp

Loved this scene. Fantastic work.

Nuclear Angel

It is really impressive how that scene felt like real actors and not cgi. Great job on it, and congrats to get the chance to work on it. 

Asura

That entire episode was one of the most thrilling in the series. I do wonder how all the CG is incorporated so well. The CG TV industry has gotten unbelievably good!

Ave

Edited post with breakdowns