Autodesk has a a nice case study online from Double Negative, discussing how they were able to use Autodesk Maya to create many of the effects in the Harry Potter franchise, focusing heavily on the latest and final chapter.
“We had a Dragon Team and a Hogwarts Team,” says Vickery. “They were almost like 2 separate production facilities in many ways. The complexity of the work on this film was so massive, with this incredible white dragon and a fully CG Hogwarts that had to be destroyed in epic fashion. It was such a big operation, in fact, that the filmmakers held a lot of the work back for the first installment of Deathly Hallows, mainly so we could build a well-oiled machine for the second part. Maya, of course, was a big part of that machine.”
