Granite Imagery takes us behind the scenes of their first major VFX project, showcasing how they utilized Blender to create stunning environments and complex shots for the film Kalki. This article breaks down their contributions, challenges, and creative process in bringing the film's visual effects to life.
More than 16 studios worked on Kalki’s VFX, we were one of them and this was our first ever big project.
What role did Blender play in the creation of the VFX shots for “Kalki”?
We used Blender for all the CG related work, for other work like keying, roto, matchmove, comp, we used different softwares that our artists were comfortable with.
I will start with the first breakdown video “Complex Tour”:
The name of the video Complex Tour we got from the movie itself, where the main actor of the movie goes to explore the “Complex” (name of the grand place there) environment, and we were tasked to show the interior of the place they go through, the lift sequence, those lifts take them to that place.
We were also given opportunity to add and extend the forest shot, we extended that shot to make the forest appear dense and lush green with that hero pink tree in the foreground.
Then the Military Shot, it was all CG Environment, entirely done in Blender from start to finish, initial concept and 3d layout was done by Immortal Collective, big shoutout to them for doing I think all concept arts of the movie, they used Blender too for creating those concept arts in 3d. We were given 3d files of the environment, we made many changes to the concept according to the client needs, added military crowd animation, added those vehicles, animated them as well, scene got a little heavy for our PC, couldn’t render it with our system as it would take forever, so used Garage Farm render farm for the final rendering.
In the Lift sequence, there were more than a couple of shots of the lift going up in the movie, we keyed and roto’d where it was necessary and added CG Lift background in the shots. Also added Lift glass as they had shot those scenes without glass in the original scan.
Drone shot, we had to replace the drone from the original scan as the client didn’t like it and wanted us to replicate them in 3d to give them more movement than it was in the original footage. We modelled the drone in Blender from scratch, textured it using Substance Painter, animated it and lit it to match as close to the original as possible and add some movement instead of the static position that was in the footage.
In the background it’s the same environment as in the first lift shot you saw, just changed the camera angle. Forgot to mention but we also extended the lift’s top part as the footage we were given didn’t have lift top, we have done this in other shots too but haven’t included in the breakdown as it would be too long of a video.
Stairs shot, same as all the other shots, we keyed and roto’d and exended the original shots with CG environment made in Blender. Also showed the drone from earlier shot, scanning the actress.
Lift going up with camera panning around it shot, this shot needed lots of roto as it was really hard to key it all, added the Lift room background in it and showed a glimpse of Military Base at the end that was shown earlier in the video. This shot is supposed to show they are passing the military base area and going up.
Were there any particular challenges or breakthroughs in using Blender for the VFX work in “Kalki”?
We did not face that many challenges with Blender but did face one that felt big at the time to overcome.
Blender doesn’t have an Overscan feature which we really need use of, as the original scan we used to get had distortions, and to add that distortion in post we needed overscan when rendering, but Blender doesn’t have that feature (yet), so we had to do a little web searching and found we could tweak focal length and resize the shot in post to get those extra pixels for distorting the render afterwards. Some shots that didn’t have heavy camera movement, we just rendered single image, for these single image renders it would have been huge help if Blender had native Overscan feature, thankfully we found the solution.
Can you describe the workflow and pipeline setup involving Blender and other software tools used in the VFX production?
We rendered all the shots with multi light passes, data passes like Normal/Position/Depth, and Cryptomatte passes cause we needed as much control as we could get so we didn’t have to render again to make small changes to the final render.
What specific Blender features or techniques were most valuable in achieving the visual style of “Kalki”?
We used Cycles extensively for rendering all the shots. Also forgot to mention but we used Blender 4.0 and older versions for the entire project. We had setup ACES for rendering everything in Cycles.
Are there any tips or insights you’d like to share with the Blender community based on your experience working on “Kalki”?
For other Blender artists, our biggest advice would be to ask for questions wheater it is on Discord servers or Blender Artits or on Reddit, ask what you aimed for for your scene, what problems are you facing, technical ones or creative ones, ask for feedback on different forums, no one minds you asking them for help or feedback.
We have our own Discord server set where we used to show our work and help each other out, we are there almost all day working, all communication with our artists of the work Kalki we did was on Discord (except with the client). Come join there to chill with us, sharing our Discord link below.
Check out our other VFX breakdowns for Kalki 2898 AD here:
