Invisible Visual Effects in Reacher: How WeFX Crafted a Seamless Digital World
Beck’s mansion is featured heavily in season three of Amazon Prime Video’s Reacher.
A location scout would probably have better odds of finding a needle in a haystack than finding the perfect mansion, located in Maine, with the sprawling sea as a backdrop.
That’s where WeFX came in.
How it Started
The mansion in question is actually based on a real one, the Escarpment House, which is
located about 40 minutes outside Toronto in Caledon Village. The sprawling estate is nowhere near the ocean, let alone a lake, in actuality it is situated amongst farmland and forests.
So it presented a challenge for the team: how can we bring the ocean to the estate, and the estate to the ocean.
The team started previs tests, and created a base geometry that merged the coastline topology with the escarpment topology giving them a great jumping off point for making a seamless environment.
This was a fluid and iterative process, and collaboration became the key ingredient in making this a success.
Designing a CG Mansion
Creating the Beck estate involved recreating the entire escapement house in 3D, right down to the drapes on the windows, the patio furniture, umbrellas, even the lawn mower’s patterns groomed into the hillside.
This allowed them to shoot oceanside plates in Newfoundland and have the WeFX team seamlessly drop the mansion replica into that environment.
Image from Amazon Prime Video
More Invisible Visual Effects
But the challenges extended beyond mere architecture. The WeFX team handled everything from full CG trucks for bullet-riddled action sequences to intricate blood simulations for intense fight scenes.
One particularly memorable task was the microwave explosion, which involved layering multiple simulations to capture the chaotic progression from a spark to a full-blown kitchen fire.
The viewer had to see the gas in the room catch fire, which required multiple simulations stacked up to feel the explosion ramp up exponentially.
Beck’s Death
When it was time for Beck’s demise, the character needed to have a death on par with his
sprawling estate.
To riddle his body with bullets, WeFX modeled and simulated Beck’s shirt, created FX blood simulations before having it pool on the floor around practical debris.
Tools of the Trade:
To bring the Beck mansion from Ontario to Maine, WeFX employed the full VFX toolbox:
● Zbrush for sculpting
● Substance Painter and Mari for texturing
● Maya for Model, Rig and Animation
● Houdini for FX, environment, lookdev and lighting
● Arnold for rendering
● Nuke for compositing
A Look Ahead to Season 4
As production on the fourth season of Reacher gets underway, the theory is it will follow the 13th of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, Gone Tomorrow. Star Alan Ritchson has said on socials it “may be the best season yet.”
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