Thanos, played to perfection by Josh Brolin, brings the entire universe to its knees, wiping out half of all life with the snap of his fingers. In Endgame, the Avengers manage to regroup and fight back, ultimately prevailing against their most insidious foe, but at a terrible, gut-wrenching cost.
The responsibility for translating Josh Brolin’s performance capture into the fully digital Thanos once again fell on Weta Digital, along with Digital Domain, as it had for Infinity War. “We were happy with the way he turned out for Infinity War and were thrilled to have a chance to work with him again on Endgame,” Weta Digital VFX supervisor Matt Aitken shares. “We always find ways to improve. There were a couple of shortcomings with his facial rig, particularly around the corner of the mouth, where we couldn’t completely achieve the range of expression we wanted. We took the opportunity to get our facial modelers to work out how to increase the range of expression there. We also had this new tool called Deep Shape, which allows us to add more fine details to the facial performance. I like to think of it as another fine octave of detail in the face shapes. You think of facial animation taking Thanos’ face from one expression to the next, but we’re not changing the shape of the face in either of those two endpoints. There’s an intermediate phase where we are looking at the tissue as it moves from one place to the next. Not something you would necessarily recognize consciously, but it adds a more natural range of details to Thanos’ face shape and in doing so, adds to the believability of him as a character.”
Read the full article in AWN.