Amazing Breakdown of Mulan's Impressive VFX

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Mulan is a live-action adaptation of the 1998 animated film of the same name, which in turn is an adaptation of a 1,500-year-old Chinese Folklore story called Ballad of Mulan. Weta Digital, Image Engine, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Crafty Apes all had a hand in bringing this tale to life.

Building The Imperial City.
To build the Imperial city, WETA Digital went to the backlot at XY studios in China where they have a set of a medieval Chinese city that's about 1/3 of a mile by 1/3 of a mile and there they did the largest LIDAR scan they had ever done to date. From this scan, they could recreate the XY studios medieval city backlot digitally. Then they took these CG buildings they had created and basically cut them up into sections, similar to building blocks. These sections were then put into a layout system they had developed in Houdini that can procedurally generate buildings using different combinations of these "Building blocks" they had created.
By studying historical maps and the layout of the city of Chang'an (which was from around the same time and about the same size) they gained information so they could make a "ruleset" for their layout tool to know, where the richer areas were, where temples should be, and basically govern the general layout of the city. This system allowed them to quickly create, edit and adjust the entire city as a whole, rather than go in and edit it building by building.

Digital Black Wind.
For a lot of scenes, Mulan's horse, Black Wind, was indeed a real horse being ridden by the lead actress, and the action was done practically, but for some scenes, like the Avalanche escape scene, it would have been impossible to do practically and so Sony Pictures Imageworks had to do it digitally. Using a mechanical horse dressed in green fabric and set in front of a green screen backdrop, they filmed the actress going through the riding motions with high-powered fans blowing her hair, this mechanical horse and backdrop were then digitally removed and substituted with SPI's CG horse and CG Avalanche background.

CG Animals.
In addition to work on Mulan's home, detailed 2.5D Digital matte paintings for Mulan's training sequences, and digitally recreating a low-resolution drone shot of the terraced rice paddies, Image Engine did quite a lot of CG animal work too:
A CG chicken, that had to appear alongside real chickens in the same shot, meant it had to pass "The Pepsi Test". Image Engine basically just put their CG chicken next to a real chicken and tweaked it until you couldn't tell the difference, 2 CG rabbits were also made, these were based on a taxidermy mount that was filmed on set and under the same lighting.

Garrisons and Outposts.
Image Engine had to build and extend various locations in the film. For the Rouran warrior encampment, they had to model CG tents on the three practical tents that were in the original plates, build 8 different agents for the crowds, and add CG horses for which they reused the assets created for the Bori Khan Attack scene.
The Mountain Garrison and the Desert garrison were actually shot on the same set in New Zealand, the VFX team used different set extensions, different internal designs and layouts, and different 2.5D Dmp's to create the illusion of two completely different locations.

Final Battle scene.
Extensive set extensions were carried out throughout the film but perhaps one of the biggest was in the final battle scene. To extend the battlefield Sony Pictures Imageworks combined a LIDAR scan of the filming location with drone footage of the area to give them a detailed map of the area as well as grass, rock, and scrub texture details that they could later use for their CG extensions. They then added modeled assets and CG smoke to complete the "battlefield" look.

Avalanche.
The Avalanche at the end of the final battle required Sony Pictures Imageworks to build a new system inside Houdini to simulate ice and snow, called Katyusha. This system allowed them to take a volumetric approach to the avalanche simulation. They then referenced real avalanche footage to understand what makes it move the way it does, this allowed the artists to be creative and speed it up or slow it down for artistic reasons without making it look unrealistic. SPI then simulated many different passes to ensure flexibility during compositing.

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