In the shuttle destruction shot, an airplane with Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane along with other members of the press corps inside and a space shuttle on its back, heads away from earth. Rather than rocketing from Cape Canaveral, the astronauts will release the shuttle from the 777 when they reach 50,000 feet.

But, the couplings don’t open, the shuttle fires anyway, and Superman flies to the rescue. He disengages the shuttle, throws it into space, and looks back to see that the 777 has caught fire. When he grabs a wing, it breaks off. Then, the other wing breaks. He chases after the plane as it plunges toward a baseball stadium and catches it by the nose barely in time. The crowd cheers as he jockeys the plane onto the ground. Superman is back. Only a few baseball players, 30 extras used for lighting reference, and the ground are real in this sequence. But for a few close-up shots of Superman, everything is digital.

Plates shot of a peninsula near Washington DC provided the land. For the stadium, Imageworks projected photos onto a model created from a Lidar scan of a stadium and remapped the city beyond. They packed the stadium with digital people animated with around 70 motion cycles that they controlled using a custom Houdini-based solution. The fire, smoke, ocean water, airplane, shuttle, and clouds are all digital. Modelers built the 777 so that it could easily break apart with blend shapes and rigid body simulations. “The plane flexes quite a bit,” says Monos. “But, once it breaks, it becomes more rigid.”

As Superman wrestles with the plane, deformation and muscle systems in the rigs helped animators make the shot convincing. “We could sculpt him with sliders here and there to make sections of his arms more defined and to tighten his abdomen as he grabs something,” says Jones. To create the smoke and fire emanating from the plane, effects artists started with fluids simulated in Maya. Then, to manipulate the fluids further, they moved particles driven by information from the simulation into Houdini to add resolution and turbulence.

“Houdini is a good hub for mixing and matching sims from different sources,” Vilela says, “So we didn’t have smoke blowing from one direction and flames from another.” When the smoke and fire elements needed to interact with the plane and debris, RenderMan handled the reflections and shadows. When the interaction was limited, Splat sufficed. But, of all the effects created at Imageworks, Vilela believes the clouds were the most challenging.

To make it possible to art direct the clouds, the crew started with Maya models - simple geometry - that, once approved, moved into Houdini where the geometry turned into point clouds with thousands of particles. Once in Houdini, the effects artists groomed the clouds and assigned shading properties that changed the density of particular areas. “Houdini is our bridge to RenderMan, so we were able to customize shading groups through the clouds,” says Vilela. A clustering RenderMan DSO converted the thousands of points in the Houdini clouds into hundreds of millions of particles and made it possible for Superman to fly through the clouds with the camera trailing behind and god rays shining through. “It’s beautiful,” Vilela says.

Effects such as this helped create the emotional impact the director wanted. In one 900-frame shot, for example, Superman flies through the clouds right up to the camera. “He smiles and enjoys the moment,” says Jones. “It was great to make it feel as epic and big as Bryan [Singer] envisioned it.” At one time, digital doubles replaced stunt doubles in shots that were too dangerous or impossible for humans to do. The first digital double was, arguably, Batman in the film Batman & Robin, which released in 1997, created to help Batman take a 60-foot tumble. An effects team at Pacific Data Images (PDI) created the stunt double.

John Dykstra was the visual effects supervisor and in 2004, he won an Oscar for best achievement in visual effects for 'SpiderMan 2', for which Imageworks pushed the state of the art by using LightStage 2 to duplicate Alfred Molino’s face for the digital double. Now, they’ve done it again. Imageworks created the multiple extreme close-ups of Superman’s face for stunts which appear during flying scenes. But, because they occupy half the screen and look so much like Brandon Routh, they prove that digital doubles can do far more than stunt work.