CGSociety has a great behind-the-scenes look at the visual effects of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, including the work of Asylum and Double Negative.
There were a variety of rigs to deal with, everything from simple car rigs to eight legged dragons. And for animation, Asylum uses a transformation based blending system, “essentially like a pose-based deformation system, but we have direct control of all the inputs, which you don’t typically get with a pose-based system,” explained Rick Grandy, Asylums’ Rigging and Pipeline Supervisor. “We control the x-forms and all the individual blends, and it’s layered, so each one can be independent geometry or components of the geometry, so it’s much more scalable than applying a giant PSD through a muscle system.” This was used in most of the characters, with the dragon using this technique the most.
