A buddy cop action comedy film in which Miami detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) find themselves in a high-stakes pursuit after their boss, Captain Howard, is framed as a drug smuggler.
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Feature Film VFX
Bad Boys 4
Framestore
A buddy cop action comedy film in which Miami detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) find themselves in a high-stakes pursuit after their boss, Captain Howard, is framed as a drug smuggler. Led by VFX Supervisor Dom Hellier, our Melbourne studio constructed the environments for the explosive third act in the film, set in an abandoned alligator themepark.
The environment work focused on digital extensions and CG replacements of structures and objects that would interact with a seaplane crashing into the building, which required a huge amount of planning and attention to detail. The team eventually constructed five seaplane variants: default (clean), tail damage, wing damage, in-between damage and aftermath damage. The third act also features Duke, a 14 foot albino alligator, which required the team to meticulously perfect intricate scale patterns and lifelike eye textures for stunning realism. The production used a puppet to capture plate photography, which was then replaced by the larger CG asset.
Doing this swap demanded that the artists also produce a stunning water simulation to blend the moving water on the plate to any CG water surrounding Duke. The artists created a custom-optimized surface tension solver into Houdini's FLIP solver to capture realistic droplet and tendril formations, and used a point cloud-based ripple solver for fine-scale surface turbulence and developed custom solvers for underwater bubbles and surface foam to achieve close-up realism. For shots with water washing over the camera lens, they devised techniques to deform water geometry to match the screen space water line.
CREW
VFX Supe: Dom Hillier
Software
Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Substance painter and zbrush.
In addition, we used the Framestore internal software Freak