MAXON, a developer of professional 3D modeling, animation, painting and rendering solutions, announce that three design studios–Sarofksy, Chicago, Perception, New York City and SPOV, London–relied on the versatility of its 3D software solution Cinema 4D as a key content creation tool to shape the mind-bending imagery on display throughout the Disney/Marvel Studios blockbuster, Doctor Strange.
Doctor Strange stars Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role and follows the story of neurosurgeon Doctor Stephen Strange who, after a horrific car accident, discovers the hidden world of magic and alternate dimensions.*
Cinema 4D has been a key production tool for the past five years at the design-driven production company Sarofsky. For Doctor Strange, the studio used Cinema 4D’s MoGraph and Xrefs to deliver a fully rendered 2D and stereoscopic main-on-end title (MOE) sequence. The Sarofsky team, headed by lead creative Erin Sarofsky, EP Steven Anderson, producer Sam Clark, CG supervisor John Filipkowski and others, designed a series of animated mandalas (geometric patterns that represent the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically) to look like gemstones and weathered gold that connected to the film’s rich symbolism and themes of repetition and symmetry.
The studio faced a major challenge defining how detailed the mandalas should be. “As lined artwork, the mandalas looked beautiful when very complex,” Filipkowski explained. “But when creating them in 3D, the complexity became very heavy, and at some points almost unmanageable, especially when we attempted to move around the viewport. Using the instancing clones and Xrefs in Cinema 4D allowed us to continue to evolve our scenes, camera work and animation explorations without waiting for the computer to catch up.”
“On a complex MOE title project like Doctor Strange, the Cinema 4D toolset let us focus more on what we are creating instead of exactly how it will be created,” Filipkowski added. “The options afforded by using custom procedural shaders gave the gemstones and gold imagery a photorealistic feel as though they were all textured individually.”
Doctor Strange marks the fifth feature film MOE title project that Sarofsky has worked on for Marvel Studios. The studio previously used Cinema 4D on Captain America: Civil War, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Ant-Man.
