ILM Presents : The Visual Effects of The Avengers

ILM just released this fantastic little behind the scenes featurette for last years Avengers, featuring a stylized presentation of all the work that went into bringing the settings to life. There are plenty of surprises in store in this reel, including quite a few truly surprising, 'Wait, that was 3D?!' moments.

As an example, the visual representations of the 1800 or so 'panospheres,' photographic panoramas used for texturing the New York settings to a photoreal finish were truly remarkable, fooling just about everyone. The folks at ILM used an in house modeling tool called Zeno, Autodesk Maya for animation and Pixar's famous Renderman suite to render out the composite shots that went into the final fim.