Digital Domain faces up to the heady challenge of making M.O.D.O.K.

by The Editor · Published 30 March 2023 · Updated 30 March 2023

Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania features one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most bizarre villains, brought to life by VFX studio Digital Domain.

M.O.D.O.K.(an acronym for Mechanised Organism Designed Only for Killing), described as “a five-foot-tall flying face”, has been a staple of Marvel Comics for more than 50 years. Most recently the character had his own stop-motion adult animated television series on Hulu. To reimagine him for the MCU the Digital Domain team created a fully CG version of the character – driven by the actor’s performance.

The appearance of M.O.D.O.K. in the MCU film continues the story of the villainous Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from 2015’s Ant-Man who entered the mysterious Quantum Realm. There he was reborn in a monstrous form.

Dave Hodgins, Digital Domain VFX supervisor explained: “Over our 30-year history, Digital Domain has created some of the most iconic CG characters ever seen on film, including Thanos, Benjamin Button, the Ready Player One cast and more, but this really is a first.

“Part of the fun of working with Marvel Studios is that they keep coming up with some of the most imaginative characters and environments, which allows us to create something that fans will remember.”

Machine man

Digital Domain began by capturing footage of Stoll and testing different looks, starting with various proportions. Multiple iterations were considered as the team sought a balance between a bizarre creature and a photo-real humanoid. The team even tested a version that included the character’s comic-accurate bowl haircut, along with other styles. Ultimately, Digital Domain and Marvel Studios decided on a version of the character that resembled Stoll’s face and hairstyle but at 5.72x the actual size, measuring 1.7m from head-to-toe and 1.2m from front to back.

To drive the performance, Stoll appeared in a capture volume wearing an HMC (head-mounted camera) and performed his scenes while watching the live-action footage from the set (the production used a large, grey 3D-printed cutout of his face as a stand-in).

Stoll’s performance was then processed through Digital Domain’s proprietary Masquerade 2.0 facial capture system, which uses neural networks to map out the actor’s face and create working, photorealistic animation.

Although Masquerade was able to generate a model that accurately conveyed Stoll’s performance, the team at Digital Domain still needed to add a few finishing touches by hand, including – and perhaps most importantly – the eyes. Using Maya for design and Mari to texture, artists built the character’s eyes by hand, down to the tear ducts and folds within the eye. The team then used V-Ray 5’s Random walk SSS skin shader, which maintains the base forms of the face and lets the fine pore details be more readable.

From there, the team at Digital Domain still had to address the unique movement limitations of the character. During Stoll’s performance, the actor frequently used full body mannerisms to convey emphasis. The character of M.O.D.O.K., however, is a face held in place by a metallic chassis that constrains his jaw and limits any gesticulations. Using a custom deformer in Maya, animators removed any additional movements from Stoll’s footage while also altering his jaw to reflect the constraints of the character.

Finally, Digital Domain developed a new blood flow pipeline that leverages machine learning and creates a library of data from scanned data of Stoll. Once the team began working on the final version of M.O.D.O.K., the library of data was triggered by Digital Domain’s proprietary Weighted Pose Space Deformation (WPSD) system, which calculates edge strain differences to drive the maps so no animator input is necessary.

The team capped it all off by adding a heartbeat monitor (that changes in the film as needed), a metal battle mask inspired by the character’s comic book roots and a handful of futuristic weapons created to fit the specifications of the film.