Important Looking Pirates on rendering Westworld:
For all the character work on Westworld, we used Arnold. It’s perfect for preserving detail in skin shading and also handles hair/fur very efficiently. For shading, we quite often work with Anders Langlands, alShader and also use shaders written here at ILP. Besides Arnold, we also used V-Ray for the train station sequence.
Bobo Skipper (VFX Supervisor of Important Looking Pirates):
We started our shot production for Westworld in early February 2016. The size of the team varied depending on what episode we were on. At times we were about five people and other times around 15. In total, we delivered around 65 shots.
We were so excited when Jay Worth (VFX Supervisor) approached us. The show looked promising, and there were a lot of cool shots planned. Our goal is always to deliver the best possible quality, and for all the VFX we did on "Westworld" the most important thing was that shots helped drive the story. I think the first season turned out to be incredible and I’m proud of our contribution to the show.
In general, the challenge was to deliver high-quality shots for all our sequences. A few of the extra tricky ones included creating a young version of Anthony Hopkins, a big terraformer digging up dirt and rock and the sequence of the robot boy opening up the face.