The Kessel Run

“The space scenes for the Kessel Run were definitely a challenge for us to set up,” recalls Mihai Cioroba. “It’s a highly energetic sequence, with a ton of elements and a ton of efforts. There was a TIE fighter fight with the Falcon, there were carbon bergs, explosions, rain, a wet Millennium Falcon we had to develop, and the large set of Maelstrom clouds that they were flying through.

“So we made sure to prep the sequence in advance, and worked out a really great setup between all the departments to make sure everything would work well together and would flow easily from one department to the next. We spent a great deal of time at the beginning to make sure that happened, so we could make sure everything was consistent, work out any technical details, and then also make sure we had a well-established artistic look when we ran the full sequence.”

There were five main sections: the cloud tunnel, the Maelstrom, the gravity well, the space monster, then finally the Carbonoid crashing wall escape. “Clouds are pretty challenging to shape through simulation,” notes Cioroba. “So for the first part, the cloud tunnel, the San Francisco team led by Alexis Hall took a hybrid approach of procedural flat cloud grids rolled into tubes, and hero simulations for interaction with the star destroyer and rocks. Frustum rasterised volumes were an elegant tool to keep volume generation necessary only inside the camera view.”

The Vancouver team took charge of the Maelstrom sequence. “This was a violent space storm made of frustum grid clouds, rain and debris,” explains Cioroba. “The only light sources here were lightning bolts and explosions, so all elements were rendered for lighting with AOVS, and one of the big challenges here was to escape the tunnel vision and give the feeling of flying through an organic storm, even though it’s in space.

“This was pretty tricky, so we developed a kind of previs viewport method for choreographing a handful of lightning strikes. And we established a holistic render view with Mantra, including all elements on one render. It was low resolution and lower quality than the final look, obviously. But it was a clear first look with everything together, and this helped speed up the creative and approval processes for a larger number of complex shots.”

The gravity well was achieved using a procedural approach by the San Francisco team, supervised by Florent Andorra. “They were using the parametric co-ordinates of guide geometry, and they created clouds that appeared to spiral into this gravity well,” explains Cioroba. “That’s something that’s previously been difficult to artdirect with simulation approaches. Then simulated volumes and rigid bodies were added in order to give the appearance that the effect is alive and unpredictable, and on a large scale.”

The space monster was created in San Francisco by a creature team supervised by Karin Cooper. “For interaction with the gravity well, the monster’s tentacles were rigged into rigid body dynamics, with secondary cloth simulations for webbing, and the collision guidepoints were used to attach and pull tentacles into the web. The tearing skin of the space monster was built as a cloth mesh and fascia simulated with a dynamic flesh system.”

The Vancouver team was also involved in the Carbonoid crashing wall escape. “This large-scale environment was traversed by the Falcon and its chasers, at speeds from 6002,000mph,” says Cioroba. “We sold the sense of danger with a balance between multiple layers of clouds, debris and destruction. We developed bespoke and library-based tectonic plate explosions, both in 3D and rendered as 2D elements to be used by the compositing team. The library is comprised of almost 40 simulations, each with multiple components rendered from various angles.”

“The sequence involved so many elements that we had to run contact sheets for them for sanity checks,” he adds. “We made heavy use of deep compositing to handle everything from atmospherics to large-scale structures, and our compositing supervisor Abishek Nair and his compositing lead here, Jason Madigan, created some custom Nuke setups to co-ordinate individual lightning strikes on all the elements, starting from the effects choreography and adding tiny details and all sorts of comp magic.”