In Episode 2 of Season 2 of HBO’sThe Last of Us,Abby inadvertently awakens a horde of infected that have been lurking beneath the snow. She is forced to run for her life in a dangerously tense scene that is one ofThe Last of Us’most chaotic and nail-biting. The anxiety of that scene is not just present for the viewers, though - it was also the VFX team’s reaction when they found out just how many infected they needed to create and animate to bring the horde to life.
In a conversation with Game Rant,The Last of UsVFX Supervisor Nick Epstein and Animation Supervisor Dennis Yoo discussed the challenges and triumphs of creating Episode 2’s horde of infected. “We went into it knowing it was going to be a big challenge,” said Epstein of Neil Druckmann andCraig Mazin’s visionfor the scene. They worked with a variety of motion capture performers to create the horde’s movement, then utilized CG to vary the appearances of individual infected as well as ensure their movement through the snow was realistic.
When creating a horde filled with so manyClickers and other infected, the team first had to ensure they didn’t all look the same. “It isn’t like a game character - you see game characters in crowds, and you want them uniform,” Yoo explained. Each infected needed to look individual, despite all originating from a small team of motion capture performers, so the team created a method of varying their hair and clothing. Epstein described the process:
“We have this mix-and-match clothing system so the infected can wear anyone’s clothing. They can inherit any hair or grooming style as well. That gives us a ton of variation. And then, we could also do things like procedurally pattern the wardrobes. Things like that. So we ended up with maybe, I’d say, about 400 or so base infected.”
Another method used to vary the horde’s appearance was how advanced each member’sCordycepsinfectionwas. While rarer types of infected appeared in small numbers - for example, only a single terrifying Bloater appeared in the group attacking Jackson - the team was able to work with Mazin and Druckmann to establish different “levels” of infection and apply them to the frozen horde.
The Horde’s Movement Proved A Challenge
Yoo discussed how creating the movement of the horde was also a difficult multistep process. He used the movement of five performers, with heights ranging from four and a half to six feet, to create non-uniform motion patterns as the horde charged through the snowin pursuit of Abby. But that wasn’t enough - they had to integrate the infected colliding with each other as well as running over their dead, still-frozen brethren. Yoo explained:
“We had a lot of simulations on top of the horde running through, but they weren’t really interacting with each other. They just looked like a bunch of marathoners, you know? The organic-ness of bumping and pushing - that wasn’t there.”
The final layer of difficulty came from the snow itself, as they had to animateThe Last of UsS2 Episode 2’srunning horde realistically reacting with the powder underfoot. Yoo, who was born in Canada and is something of an expert on snow, admitted that he was rather particular when it came to figuring out how the horde would run through it. “That’s too sandy, that’s too powdery, it has to be kind of wet, or not wet at all.” However, he was ultimately satisfied with the final product. “This is perfect snow, the way it crusts. The top layer actually crusts differently than the stuff underneath. It’s really gnarly.”
