News On The Real Iron Man....
This is some interesting reading. How the real Ironman costume is and how it is in the movie....
Taken it in consideration.... I think we did a good job on the suit!
BELLOW A DRAFT OF THE ARTICLE:
The live action Iron Man suit created by Stan Winston Studio was ideal for static shots, but a digital one was needed for movement and of course anything where Iron Man would fly. The practical version wasn’t just to be digitally matched, it needed to exceed it with better mobility and heroic proportions. “Marvel Comics seemed to have a precise mathematical formula to make him look more heroic, how the big the chest is supposed to be compared to the waist and the legs,” said Smythe.
Marvel wanted the torso elongated, and the waist shrunk down, unlike true human proportions. “We had to make something that looked photoreal and be able to intercut with the live action suit, sometimes within the same shot, have part of the suit be real and another part be CG while making it look clean with nice motion and shape of the character.
Iron Man is about 6’3”, whereas Robert Downey Jr. is not that tall. The practical suit is built to fit his physique and size, so we had to have our suit be able to mix and match with the practical suit as well as the superhero size version.”
There was also the issue that Downey found the practical suit restrictive to his acting, as explained by Hickel. “Winston’s guys made these beautiful suits that were faithful to the Iron Man design, but they were hard to move in. We told Robert Downey Jr. if he couldn’t get into the pose or move the way he wanted to, we could add the suit digitally. When he saw that, he didn’t want to wear the practical suit at all, to the point where there were times when we almost wanted to bribe him to put the practical suit on.
He liked not wearing it, so we wound up doing more shots than we anticipated. But the bottom line was, he was more comfortable and felt better, so presumably his performance was better. For us, it’s all about making the performance better and not encumbering the actor.”
Regardless of pose, the Iron Man suit needed to appear sculpted, a perfect fit, and heroic without confining. While a comic book version has the liberty to ignore parts that might break the silhouette, the 3D version didn’t have that freedom. The solution was to create a system of overlapping panels that could slide and twist against each other, without bits and pieces poking out at odd angles.
The difficulty of creating realistic looking metal was a challenge, especially considering the constant mix and match of practical and digital costuming. The brushed metal practical suit had tremendous detail, and digitally creating a brushed bumpy surface would have required too much rendering power to resolve without flicker and aliasing. “We had to come up with some new technologies to simulate what happens to a brushed metal surface, both where you are up too close and when you are further away.” Smythe chuckled, “That required a lot of words you find in Siggraph journals. We are fully buzz word compliant with all of our technologies.”
What were some of those buzz words? Full anisotropic adjustable BRDF shaders with high dynamic range environment lighting capture for image based lighting, with capabilities to adjust lighting. “We actually sent some samples of the suits out to a lab to have them analyzed to get a measured BRDF of the surfaces, which we then replicated as closely as we could with our surface material shaders, again requiring a balance between the real surface characteristics and wanting to be able to tweak and adjust them per shot as needed. What comes out of the box mathematically is not always what you want. Sometimes the director will say, ‘I want the highlight there, not here.’ So you have to move the light and change the surface and fix things without breaking the things that they do like.”
THE COMPLETE ACRTICLE:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4510
This is how i move in the suit:
http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/nyheter/spill/verdi/53841
Note neckseal is not attached on the TV shot.