The world of visual effects requires technical mastery and creative problem solving, a dual challenge that Zhehao Qiao took on as the film’s chief editor. Weapons. The project required creating digital stand-ins for characters undergoing supernatural transformations and performing high-stakes physical actions, pushing the boundaries of character rigging. His work was central to three critical sequences: the “cursed” digital facial replacements, a robust full-body double for the character Marcus, and a complex and specialized skin peeling effect.
Qiao’s philosophy for managing the rigging team on such a unique and demanding project is to protect the team’s energy and maximize its focus on quality. Much of the work involved creating similar digital double setups, which could lead to artist disengagement. His strategy was to automate mechanical, repetitive tasks by turning them into custom tools and scripts, allowing artists to focus their time and energy on the creative details that really mattered, like refining subtle facial deformations around enlarged eyes or ensuring the overall believability of a performance. It also fostered a strong sense of accountability by ensuring that the same artist retained ownership of a character from start to finish, thus leading to higher quality results. This focus on tool development proved to be the most important lesson of the project, with Qiao reducing a week of manual labor to a single day by modifying a self-facial mounting system. This efficiency gain allowed the team to focus on improving deformation quality, skin behavior and muscle sensation.
Successful delivery of the digital stunts required constant and iterative collaboration with the modeling and animation departments. With the modelers, the process began with integrating the initial sculpts, which often revealed problems such as eyelids collapsing into enlarged eyeballs once the platforms were set in motion. Qiao’s team provided clear notes to modelers and added additional editing layers to support modified shapes, drawing on their experience to provide early guidance and flag high-risk expressions before assets moved through the pipeline. With the facilitators, the collaboration was a continuous feedback loop. When working on shots, animators often needed shot-specific controls, such as a tool to subtly offset an element, such as the nose, to better align it with the original plate photograph. Qiao’s team would adapt the rig by adding new “adjustment” controls, allowing animators to fine-tune micro-movements and ensure the digital face faithfully translated the actor’s original performance. Qiao ensured that this back-and-forth process was transparent, expecting revisions to be needed early on, which maintained a positive team atmosphere and helped everyone. plan their time more efficiently.
The film’s central visual effect, characters with enlarged, protruding eyes, required entirely digital face replacements and caused the most significant technical hurdle. Due to the size of the eyes, the surrounding geometry and eyelids were severely compressed, leading to frequent intersections and abnormal distortions, especially when multiple expressions were combined. To address this issue, the team developed solutions that go beyond simple modeling corrections by incorporating intermediate shapes and combination corrections that only activate at specific values (e.g., 50% of a blink) or when two expressions are active simultaneously. They also had to create specialized systems that allowed the eyes to change position or size in 3D space while maintaining anatomical credibility. This balance – solving technical problems while preserving the original expression – was essential to maintaining realism, and its success was validated by standardized range of motion (ROM) tests, which ran the device through common facial expressions to check stability.
In addition to facial work, Qiao supervised two other demanding jobs. technical assets. The Marcus character’s full gear, built on the team’s component-based auto-mount system, had to withstand extreme, non-anatomical joint angles in sequences such as violent strikes and throws. Although this was a simpler biped assembly than the facial replacements, it required significant, detailed, character-specific corrective work to ensure that the muscles were visibly tense and bulging under tension and that the deformation held up under the larger character size and extreme poses required by the animation. Finally, for the complex sequence where the skin from a character’s face is peeled off, Qiao adapted an existing system for the tentacles and tails, treating the skin as a flexible object attached to an invisible path to achieve smooth, organic skin. Crucially, he added a second layer of custom rigging to the tip of the peeled skin, which allowed it to coil into a tight, unsettling loop, a movement the base system couldn’t naturally achieve. To ensure credibility, he built limits directly into the rig’s controls to prevent the skin from stretching to the point that its texture shatters the illusion.
Looking back WeaponsQiao is most proud of the eye effects, which validated the robustness of their automatic face-mounting system and required constant custom work and communication with other departments. The end result and audience reaction confirmed that the technical innovation successfully contributed to one of the film’s most memorable visual effects.
