Imaginary Pixels was tasked with VFX production of over 120 shots, between November 2023 and March 2024, for Red Poppies / Czerwone Maki (2024) – the biggest Polish war movie of recent years. It tells the story of the Battle of Monte Cassino – a series of brutal assaults by the Allies, led by Polish troops, against the Winter Line in Italy held by Axis forces during World War II, from January to May 1944.
Our tasks involved creating and animating 3D tanks, 3D set extensions, FX simulations, 3D creature animation, crowd duplication and lots of compositing. Imaginary Pixels was also co-producing the movie with WFDiF.
Our team on this project:
Lukas Remis – VFX supervisor
Artem Huza – compositing artist
Kajetan Czarnecki – compositing artist
Trendafil Kirilov – compositing artist
Jorge Grandes – compositing artist
Siarhei Talashka – compositing artist
Severi Kamppi – 3D Lead
Jyri Kataja – 3D generalist
Patryk Ptasiński – FX artist
Maciek Wojtkiewicz – Senior animator
Creating digital creatures
Most complex part of the VFX production involved creating and animating a 3D version of Wojtek the bear, and replacing the on-set used dummy. Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear adopted by Polish soldiers during World War II. He became an unofficial member of the Polish II Corps, helping to boost the morale of the troops. Wojtek became famous for his role in the Battle of Monte Cassino, where he helped move ammunition by carrying artillery shells. To allow him to travel with the soldiers, he was officially enlisted as a private and later promoted to corporal. Wojtek’s story symbolized camaraderie and resilience among the soldiers.
During the development of this CG creature, we’ve spent a lot of time on the hair system and the look of the fur, which is very unique for Syrian bears. Most of the shots with Wojtek required interaction with actors, so our hair system needed to dynamically respond to collisions when an actor touched him. Blender’s particle system was used to create the fur. It was separated into multiple different particle systems (head, body, neck, etc.) for more control.
One of the more challenging tasks was rotomating the actor’s arm and adding a 3D hand on top of it, to be used as fur collider. After tracking, the collisions were baked into the fur. Following several iterations on how the fur interacts with collisions and gravity, the final baking worked without many problems.
Creature animation
For animating the bear, the on-set dummy helped establish the base animation, which we could then tweak further depending on the interactions. A skin simulation was added on top of the animation to make the movement more natural, accounting for the bear’s skin being affected by gravity and movements. While watching reference footage of bears, we found it quite surprising how some bear movements, especially when standing on two feet, feel like a man in a suit 🙂
For the skin around the mouth and ears, the rig had bones that were automatically calculated based on the bear’s movements. The aim was to achieve physically accurate movements without manual keyframes, resulting in better overall outcomes and a much faster workflow.
Digital set extensions
Another significant portion of our work involved set extensions, often adding mountains in the midground or background. Based on the provided references, our 3D team created a 360-degree mountain environment to cover any possible angle in different shots. For shots with less parallax or camera movement, we’ve made a decision to render a 22K equirectangular image of the mountains, with different passes and light direction. This render was then used by compositing artists as projections to speed up the workflow, reducing the amount of CG renders.
VFX compositing
Our compositing team, aside from integrating all of the CG elements, was also responsible for adding countless muzzle flashes, bullet hits, explosions, blood splatters, and crowd multiplications. They also cleaned up the plates, removing any modern objects or crew members.
VFX production
Like in most of our VFX productions, all of the 3D aspects of our work, including modelling, shading, rigging, animation or grooming, was done and rendered using Blender. FX simulations were done with Houdini and compositing in Nuke. Project managed with CGWire Kitsu.
