Towards the end of The Last Jedi, we meet on Crait a number of Vulptex creatures, fox-like animals with crystalline bristles. Although a detailed animatronic was made for the production, the Vulptices were ultimately crafted in CG by ILM.
Academy Award nominee Ben Morris from ILM was the overall visual effects supervisor on The Last Jedi. The other VFX Oscar nominees for the film are Mike Mulholland, Neal Scanlan and Chris Corbould. Here, Morris explains the design of the Vulptices, and how they went through both practical and digital builds.
A woman had made a sculpture of a crystal fox and that drove some of the initial concept and then we pushed it a lot harder and gave them these amazing sort of Egyptian-like antlers. They’re almost like gazelles with these tall pointed ears. And they’ve got a hard bony sort of carapace coming off the top of their heads that joins these longer crystals.
Neal Scanlan’s practical effects team built an amazing practical model. When we looked at the animatronic it just didn’t have the materials we were after. The plastics just looked a little too dull and they didn’t really have that sparkle that we were after.
We also talked about whether ultimately you would be able to see the internal organs of the creature because even through all the layers of refraction into reflection kind of like are we going to put a solid body there.
One reason we went all-CG was that we really wanted to get that iridescence and oiliness in the reflectivity and the refractions that were in the original concepts, which were just stunning. And also we wanted to do the eyeballs like ‘cats eyes’ which are those reflective markers on roads.
The sound of the crystals was important to the story. So when these guys move, it’s not quite a wind chime but it’s very jingly jangly sort of new age crystals sound.
For the groom we had whole geometries that were actually groomed and reacted to the envelope of the skin. And then in between that coming towards the base it came down more to a procedural approach.
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