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[Male] They're here!

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Hi, I'm Mike Seymour from FXGuide.com, for Wired,

breaking down the tech in the latest X-Men film,

Days of Future Past.

It's one thing to fight mutants.

It's a whole nother thing to fight mutant robots.

MPC provided the future Sentinels in the film,

and produced the visual sequences

that helped sell these threatening machines

capable of absorbing mutant DNA, and using it.

In the film, they do this by using metallic scales

or blades that flared, mimicking Mystique's ability,

and her trademark appearance transition.

MPC's initial R and D idea was to take

their existing hair and fur tour

which allowed for procedural animation,

and adapt it for the scales.

However, after some further development work,

they realized that they needed to introduce

a whole new idea.

The idea of like a proxy representation

for each individual scale.

What became known as follicles.

Quite sophisticated code was then written

that allowed MPC to design the distribution,

flaring, and random orientation

of each of these scales or blades,

while making sure that no blade intersected with another.

This scale animation, which of course ripples across

the Sentinel's body was caged out as a point cloud,

and then stored as a matrix with various parameters

for position, orientation, or blade ID.

Ultimately, the Sentinels would incorporate

100,835 such blades on screen,

plus another 1,019 moving parts for inside their face.

And while procedural animation did actually work out

rather well for controlling most of these follicles

or blades, those 1,019 parts which we see

when their faces break open?

They all had to be animated by hand.

The effects team were able to then have the Sentinels

fight Sunspot with solar flares,

Iceman with arctic cold, all while of course,

Colossus and Blink try to make their elaborate escape.

All of this made the Sentinels

some of the most technically complicated

and unstoppable robots in cinema history,

which of course is why the X-Men needed to go back in time

in the first place, to stop them from ever being started.

Please subscribe for more behind-the-scenes tech.

I'm Mike Seymour, for Wired.

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Hah!

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