Case Study: Dune: Part Two saves thousands of hours of VFX roto work with Foundry’s Nuke CopyCat

Dune: Part Two saves thousands of hours of roto work with Foundry

The customer, Dune: Part Two, faced a significant visual effects challenge in needing to rotoscope the piercing blue eyes of the Fremen characters for numerous shots, a process that was extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive on the first film. To address this, the production team worked with Foundry and utilized the CopyCat machine learning toolset within its Nuke compositing software.

Foundry's solution involved training a custom CopyCat model using the artists' own data, creating a dataset of 30,000 eyes from existing shots. This model was then applied to the new footage, automatically handling the complex roto work. The implementation saved thousands of hours of manual labor, with 40% of the 1,000 eye shots requiring no additional touch-ups. The project also used CopyCat to efficiently remove an actor's tattoos, further demonstrating the tool's time-saving impact.