The artists and engineers that crafted every costume and weapon in Lord of the Rings is responsible for crafting all of the weapons, costumes and props featured in the upcoming film Warcraft. Weta won't be taking the same approach for Warcraft as they did Lord of the Rings, they had three employees working on chainmail for three years straight for Lord of the Rings after all.
While we know a trailer for Warcraft was shown off during Comic-Con we are still waiting to actually see it. In the mean-time Richard Taylor, the physical special effects and makeup artist that won five Oscars for his work on Peter Jackson’s films from Weta Workshop, went into detail on the labor of love that is the Warcraft film.
"All the weapons and all the armor that are carried by the real actors” were crafted by Weta, said Taylor. “In the case of the humans, King Llane (Dominic Cooper) and his army, they’re all physical in the movie, they’re playing against digital creatures, so they’re wielding real swords, holding real shields, wearing real armor, and that all had to be manufactured."
Weta wasn't given a generous amount of time to craft the items forcing Taylor and his team at Weta to turn to 3D printing to get the gear out on time. In the last 18 years, it's definitely become cheaper and faster to make tons of costumes and weapons through 3D printing than hand-crafted items.
“On Lord of the Rings the props were 100 percent handmade, and on The Hobbit, 60 percent of everything we made was done with robotic manufacturing, such as 3D printing, milling machines, laser printing, and plasma cutting,” he said. “When this movie came along, it had a very short deadline and the material required an incredible precision… We did a lot of 3D printing, but the bulk of the work was done by three, four and five axis milling machines, all home-built in the workshop.”
Seeing as the characters that are represented physically instead of digitally will be holding real weapons and wearing real gear should make the world somewhat more immersive.
Warcraft is slated to release on June 10, 2016.
[Yahoo]
