A deep dive into the visual effects of the film with production VFX supervisor Alessandro Ongaro and Wētā FX.
The world of video game Resident Evil has long been defined by its grotesque mutations, terrifying creatures and relentless survival-horror scenarios. For the 2026 big-screen adaptation, director Zach Cregger took a fresh approach to the franchise, following Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who finds himself caught up in a terrifying night of chaos as the T-Virus outbreak spreads through Raccoon City. Tasked with delivering a package to the city hospital, Bryan embarks on an increasingly nightmarish journey through the infected city, encountering a growing assortment of mutated humans, animals and other biological horrors along the way.
Bringing these creatures to the screen required a combination of practical creature effects and digital visual effects. Creature designer Shane Mahan and the team at Legacy Effects developed several practical creature effects, while production visual effects supervisor Alessandro Ongaro oversaw a range of creature augmentations and entirely digital ones, alongside environmental and other visual effects, totalling 708 shots. Leading the charge visual effects vendor-wise was Wētā FX, with UPP handling several visual effects sequences. Wylie Co. VFX delivered postvis and a number of VFX shots. Lola Visual Effects crafted specialized make-up fixes. Finally, Eyeline’s volumetric capture stage was utilized to capture Abrams’ performance for Mutant Bryan scenes.
For Ongaro, the project, which filmed in Prague, moved fast. “We started in August 2025 and worked for 13 months from prep to delivery,” he tells befores & afters. “Zach wanted to stay as practical as he could. That’s something that I’m always a big fan of, too. You stay practical when you can, because everything then grounds to it, and that way you maintain a visual style that is consistent.”
Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Kevin Smith concurs. “The nice thing for me, getting to be on set for the shoot, was the practical side. There was the practical Puker. There was a practical baby in the maternity ward. There’s a practical Fat Man in the sewer. You’ve got a jumping-off point of a practical thing on the set that you can base your work on. And for everything that they couldn’t get in-camera, they already had a pretty good idea of what they wanted. There was concept art for the Pedestrian, Mutant Bryan and others.”
Bryan’s dilemma
The film opens with Bryan agreeing to deliver a last-minute package to Raccoon City General Hospital. A oner following Bryan into a waiting room made use of additional extras filmed on greenscreen and composited in by UPP. Bryan then makes his way, in snowy conditions, towards Raccoon City. A female pedestrian (yes, that Pedestrian) steps onto the road and Bryan hits her with his car. She eventually winds up in a sheriff’s car, which Bryan follows.
At this point, the sheriff’s car flips in the snow. This was originally filmed as a practical stunt, but it did not give the performance the filmmakers were after. UPP then achieved the flip with a fully digital car and a fully synthetic environment. Bryan goes to investigate and engages in a cat-and-mouse chase with the woman. These shots were filmed both on location and on stages, with visual effects from UPP used to add snow and snowy environments and bridge the two shooting locations.
Indeed, snow would become a major visual effects challenge on Resident Evil. “Since we were shooting in Winter around Prague, we were hoping we would get lucky with the weather and have real snow,” recalls Ongaro. “We did, but not enough to cover everything. So we ended up using 36 tons of paper snow as fake snow. But the fake snow looks like fake snow, so we decided to replace it all. Pretty much every shot where you see snow on the ground, that is CG snow. We had days where it was snowing, so some shots have real snow snowflakes and some shots have added CG snowflakes. Again, the whole idea when we started was, let’s build as much as we can, let’s shoot as practical as we can, but where we needed to enhance or build things in CG, we did.”
Not your friendly kind of dog
Bryan escapes to a farmhouse in search of help but soon encounters a mutated dog that splits its face and launches tentacles, before being shot. Two stand-in dogs were available during filming. “They were identical,” notes Ongaro. “The breed was Belgian Malinois. They are crazy dogs! We didn’t want to do a CG dog until the face split—it was just running and then barking. I think it was a good decision. Why spend the money? I know that Wētā FX could have done it, but I think if we went CG, it would have felt CG. We tried to scan the dog but it was running around like crazy in the snow.”
A shot of the dog pushing its head through a hole in a barn door was filmed practically. “We had a piece of wood that was painted blue, with a hole,” shares Ongaro. “We asked the trainer what was the smallest hole that we could do, and if there was a way to have the dog stick his head out of it. We actually placed that piece of wood on the actual barn. The trainer was behind the dog, Austin was calling the dog, and the dog was sticking its head out, and it kept going in and out, in and out. With the magic of our editor, Joe Murphy, we managed to make it work until the last bark. Then there is a take-over. At the second bark, we transitioned to the CG version where the face split. From that point on, it was all CG by Wētā FX.”
The mutated dog was designed by Legacy Effects, with Wētā FX also contributing concepts. The dog’s tentacles grab Bryan. “We had rubber tentacles built by Legacy that could be puppeteered, and also used for lighting and shadow reference,” says Ongaro. “There’s a shot where when he’s being pulled. He was tied to a rope, and that rope was basically a tentacle rope. Then we added the CG one on top so it got blended in with the CG. When he shoots the dog, you see the tentacle unraveling and there are a mix of CG and rubber tentacles there.”
Making the Pedestrian
The woman hit by the car ultimately combines herself with a number of other people to become a creature of fused bodies and limbs, able to ‘roll’ around and pursue Bryan. “We called it the human tumbleweed,” observes Ongaro. “The creature was something Zach wanted to do practically. He said, ‘I want to hire Cirque du Soleil gymnasts, strap them together, and do it practical.’ I said, ‘That’s great. We can try. We can see where it goes, and then decide how to proceed.’ But to be honest, when I broke down the project and created a budget, I put in numbers to do the creature in CG, because you have to be prepared.”
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Early tests with gymnasts strapped together and rolling around did look promising, but could not deliver the performance required. “As much as these athletes were doing amazing things, they couldn’t deliver what we needed,” states Ongaro. “At the end of the day, they look like four people strapped together doing a cartwheel. The creature, though, was connected by the shoulders and there were other parts growing elsewhere. We also wanted the creature, while it was rotating, to interact with the environment, things that the gymnasts couldn’t do.”
Interestingly, only a sparing use of proxies or stand-ins were used on set to film scenes with the Pedestrian. “For the shot in the doorway, where you see the legs coming out,” relates Ongaro, “we actually had the same gymnasts coming out, trying to do the shot. We had different takes. That was great for reference and for lighting, but for everything else, we just had to imagine the creature was there. It was very hard to build something as a stand-in, because the creature is so big, and so many limbs, and keeps changing.”
That was, too, one of Wētā FX’s main challenges in building the Pedestrian in CG: its continued metamorphosis. Says Ongaro: “The creature changes so much. Every time you see it, it’s different. There wasn’t a main asset that you could use. But we figured out a way with Wētā to build and grow pieces in a way where it didn’t have to be welded in. We had clothes that we could use to hide the intersection and the joints. But we never really built a creature that we put on a turntable, and said, ‘Yeah. That’s it. Now make those changes.’ We let Wētā FX come up with what we needed for the shot.”
Early concepts from Legacy were fleshed out further by Wētā FX. “We kept it, intentionally, a little bit in the shadows,” notes Ongaro. “We didn’t want to reveal too much of the creature, which, I think, helps the story. One thing that we made sure was very visible in every shot was that you could see the red dress of the Pedestrian, because we wanted to make sure that the audience understood that it was the same woman that he hits with the car at the beginning, who is then chasing him all the way to the end. Sometimes, we cheated the position of the dress just to be able to show it.”
In general, the Pedestrian did not have a face. Some moments, however, reveal the face of one of the persons the creature has trapped: Umbrella scientist Paul (Paul Walter Hauser). “That’s the face you see against the fence in a shot,” reveals Ongaro. “And when the creature dies on the skybridge, there is a shot where you see a little moment with Paul’s face again.”
For Wētā FX, the Pedestrian was a significant build amongst a host of other creatures. “We knew we needed to build the Pedestrian right away and start figuring out the motion studies and how it would move because that would also edify how they shot it,” outlines Wētā FX visual effects producer Janet Walters. “Animation supervisor Eric Reynolds and his team jumped onto that straight away, and we got there nice and quickly, which helped.”
“The Pedestrian was such a unique design,” says Reynolds. “As an animator, my tendency would be to have it scuttle like a spider or something else. I’m like, ‘You can’t really want it to roll.’ But then you see the footage of the performers and you’re like, ‘Oh, he did want it to roll.’ To get started, we have a gen-man and a gen-woman puppet that are the same setup we have for every show, and we just stuck them together. We hid parts, and we built all of the different versions of the Pedestrian. That way, without even building a new asset, which takes time and money, we could start doing motion tests. That Pedestrian motion test was some of the first stuff we worked on, with the three bodies in the woods and then the five-body one that’s in the alleyway. They were really happy. We got off on a good foot with the client for how the thing’s supposed to move, and then we just carried that into production.”
Wētā FX keyframed the creature, explains Reynolds. “We would literally just rotate it and have it move forward, and then go back and be like, ‘Okay, now what do all the limbs have to do to facilitate that motion?’ Mostly you just want to get the weight right, because it already looks frightening. The language of it was just, how does a ball of limbs go forward? If there was any chance to reach out and grab a wall or a pipe with the tentacles or a foot, we would always try and break it up. When it comes down the alley, there’s a garbage container there, and you can see the legs smash down on the top of the lid and bounce off, and it just keeps going. You try and play with every element you have in the plate.”
“In animation,” adds Reynolds, “we would just do the main limbs. We don’t have any secondary on. There’s a muscle solve that comes later. There’s also a whole cloth simulation that goes on top for all the clothing that it’s wearing. That comes later, once we publish what the animation is. We did use Ragdoll a little bit where we could. You just run it, and it adds some physics. So, if you change direction really quickly, it’ll add a little bit of movement. It works really well on basic humanoid rigs. It wasn’t great for the Pedestrian because, if you get notes, you have to go back and transfer all that back onto the animation puppet, and it takes a lot of time and work. So we ended up keyframing almost all of the Pedestrian.”
Integrating the Pedestrian into the live-action photography involved dealing with several lighting scenarios. “That first reveal of it, when you see it through the woods, was just beautifully shot with the headlight from the car through the trees,” observes Wētā FX additional visual effects supervisor Jo Davison. “You get this very on/off, on/off feel of the lighting, and that did such a good job of revealing the creature in an incomplete and scary way. You see it, you don’t see it, you see it, you don’t see it—you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at.”
“Then in the alleyway,” continues Davison, “you’ve got that dark alleyway, but you’ve got that light at the end of it and halfway down. It gives you that kind of in and out of shadow feel again. It’s partially in silhouette, but you see enough of it to start to get an understanding of what you’re looking at.”
Smith oversaw shots of the Pedestrian climbing up the exterior of the hospital when Mutant Bryan is now on the skybridge. “We started off by using lights on in the hospital to give it a rim light feel, trying to make it look scary, but pretty. Most of the notes I got were just like, ‘Less, less, less, less, less light, less light, less light,’ until you just get a rim and a suggestion of motion and suggestion of the faces here and there.”
Facing RV girl
Bryan enters a tunnel that is blocked by an RV. Inside, he finds an infected girl in distress who ultimately exhibits a split face and bites him. The creature was accomplished by Wētā FX. “We started with an early concept from Legacy,” discusses Ongaro. “The original concept was a lateral split that was opening, but Zach wanted to explore some different scenarios. I worked further with one of the Wētā FX concept artists and we came up with this idea of the face opening in multiple parts. Zach’s idea was to add one eye in the center, which I thought was cool. That’s why we had that eye. We also made the pointy tongue.”
“Initially, too,” says Ongaro, “it also had some weird little tentacles at the edges that were moving, but it was making the design goofy. And so, what we decided to do, a little bit like the dog, we added some muscle striation and little suckers. On the shooting day, we had the actress and we just put a few markers on her face, set up a witness camera, and that’s how we did it. There was no crazy performance capture or anything. We had the witness cam, and then tracked the CG face, and split. On the scream, we take over her digitally.”
Down in the sewers
Bryan reaches Raccoon City and is chased by the Pedestrian into the sewers where he encounters an obese creature whose stomach bursts open to release mutant rats. This creature was dubbed ‘The Fat Man’ and was built by Legacy Effects as a 2,000-pound puppet.
“It was built in LA in pieces and then shipped over to Prague and assembled on location,” details Ongaro. “It was so heavy that, once it was placed in the set, we couldn’t move it. It was puppeteered from underneath. There were three artists from Legacy giving him some movement, breathing in and out, and adding some movement to his belly. When the stomach ripped open, that was puppeteered. Wētā FX just had to replace the belly for when the rats come out.”
Road to the hospital
Escaping the sewers, Bryan finds himself closer to the Raccoon City General Hospital, which he has now become aware includes an Umbrella Corporation lab requiring the stabilizer package he is carrying that could cure the virus. However, infected line the tops of buildings on the street Bryan is running through and jump down towards him, splatting everywhere.
“We called that ‘jumper street’,” reveals Ongaro. “Once again, we wanted to see what we could do practically. We knew that we needed CG. But we didn’t want to do just CG, because then it looks CG. We wanted to see what we can do with special effects. Could we drop bags with blood, or something in it, to get, at least, some of the timing, that would help Austin to run and react to something real? Well, that’s what we ended up doing. We found a street in Prague we could control. One side was perfect and the other side wasn’t perfect, so we had to put CG buildings there.”
For the falling bags, the special effects team set up cranes with the bags calibrated to land in a specific spot. More than 50 bags weighing around 60 kilograms each were dropped over two nights, with Abrams carrying out the run himself. A stunt performer on a wire also served as reference for one of the jumps. “We knew the timing they were taking, and we rehearsed the shit out of that one,” marvels Ongaro. “We couldn’t do many bag passes because the reset time was very long. There was the blood and fake snow and that meant re-dressing the snow. Plus the bags fell onto cars, and they had a system where they were pulling the roof in, so that when the bag hit, you had this big reaction of the car and the glass exploding.”
Wētā FX then enhanced the scene by delivering 107 falling CG bodies that matched the practical bag falls, and generated extra impact effects. “The client wanted to keep all of the practical splats because they looked great and they looked real,” mentions Davison. “We had to add a splat for every additional human that was falling. It’s all simulated, so we had to calculate impact velocities and the equal and opposite force that you get out of the splat. But then you also don’t want a whole bunch of blood and guts obscuring Austin as he does his hero run through there. So, it was a really lovely example of beautifully choreographed plates and then visual effects coming in and enhancing splats or adding splats where we needed more people falling just to really amp up the danger.”
“There was a huge amount of heavy lifting done in compositing on those shots,” continues Davison. “There was some really complex roto, because not only were we adding the splats, but you’ve got a digital hospital and, depending which way you’re looking, a digital environment that you’re adding, in some cases behind some of the practical splats. They would even animate the car where we had to land an infected. It was a huge amount of integration. And then multi-source lighting from all the street lamps refracting through and ray tracing through all those volumetrics.”
For that sequence, and others, Wētā FX employed a proprietary machine learning depth estimation system to implement snow fall. “It’s a purely compositing-based system for the snow, which is great,” remarks Davison. “It doesn’t need any FX involvement, and the artists have controls for density, turbulence and wind direction. Just having that flexibility to dial it right at the end of the process and get it integrated and working with all the opticals is a very efficient way to do it and hit the creative notes.”
The frenetic road to the hospital scene also made use of a RIALTO camera extension system during the shoot. “The RIALTO is a system that you can detach from the body of the Sony VENICE camera we were shooting on,” explains Ongaro. “It was on a little cart with two wheels that was pushed behind Austin when he was running. Because it was so close to him, we had to put a spinner in front of the lens, in case some water or blood was hitting it. The problem was that the spinner created some weird artifacts on the streetlights that we had to fix. So, there was so much work involved in that scene. It’s one of my favorite scenes because it feels so organic and so epic.”
An elevator ride with the Puker
When Bryan finally reaches the hospital, he takes an elevator up to the laboratory, only to face off against an acid-vomiting mutant. This became known as the Puker. “This elevator scene was two set-pieces,” discusses Ongaro. “There was a standalone elevator cab on a little set-piece that they could shake a little bit. That had the ceiling and the bottom that we could replace with holes caused by the acid. We actually tried, with special effects, to use some styrofoam material on top with some acid corroding through, which proved to be good reference. Then when the elevator starts falling apart, we had an elevator shaft set next door built by production designer Tom Hammock, and we shot inside that one. What we had to do was extend it, and create all the effects simulation.”
The Puker was crafted by Legacy Effects as a performer in a puppet mask. To add extra expressions, Wētā FX delivered a CG face for the creature over a range of shots. “We very quickly got one of our best concept artists onto it,” mentions Davison. “We played with warts and teeth shapes, just to make it a little more scary and a little less goofy, but still very much in the feel of the prosthetic. So, once you see the Puker up close, we ended up doing a full facial replacement.”
Baby-time
After another encounter with the Pedestrian in the elevator shaft (with the creature fended off thanks to acid from the Puker), Bryan finds himself in a maternity ward full of mutated newborns and infected suspended in blood sacs. Practical set pieces and practical Legacy Effects puppets made up the ward. Visual effects were used to enhance and move tentacles, as well as vein-like growths on the walls that moved slowly.
A baby mutant is revealed at one point with extended arms. This was a Legacy puppet. “That was great reference,” notes Ongaro. “We scanned it, and then we did it in CG. We had to do this little baby hand coming up and then keep going, and that’s something the puppeteers couldn’t do. The eyes of the baby opening was an addition that Wētā FX came up with. For shots of Bryan smashing it, Legacy built three or four puppets filled up chunks of blood so Austin could really hit something.”
“With the practical baby,” advises Smith, “you just can’t quite get articulation on the fingers and all that stuff that is just really not able to do be done with a puppet. We already had a digital bassinet from other shots, so we basically didn’t use any of that plate. We actually just recreated the whole shot from scratch with a digital bassinet and a CG version of the puppet. We followed the same outline of motion that they puppeteered on the day.”
Infected begin falling from the blood sacs, which involved practical stunts and CG work. “When they chase after him, we doubled the amount of infected with CG ones,” notes Ongaro. “Also, I always try to sneak my name into a movie I work on. So, the little bracelet that the baby wears has my last name on it.”
Onto the skybridge
Now pursued by the infected from the maternity ward, Bryan escapes onto a ruined skybridge, but soon sees the Pedestrian climbing towards him. The skybridge was a partial set-piece shot against bluescreen. “Austin was 30 feet from the floor,” indicates Ongaro. “We extended up and down, and we put the city in the background. When he shoots the door and the infected fall, we did a pass with stunts for them falling which we used for reference. It was done fully in CG by Wētā FX, and they also did all the environment and snow in CG.”
For scenes on the skybridge, Wētā FX also generated snow. “We wanted the state of the weather to reflect the peril and the progression of Bryan,” says Smith. “As he’s getting worse, the weather’s getting worse, and that by the time he’s at the skybridge, it’s just a complete blizzard. We did do some of the compositing snow approach for close-ups, but everything past a certain point became FX department simulations. There were sims for the whole area around the hospital, taking account of the wind rolling between the buildings and adding elements on top of that in comp. You want to feel that there’s a blizzard going on, but you also want to feel the depth.”
Meet Mutant Bryan
Bryan’s infection takes hold right as he delivers the package with the possible cure to the laboratory. Soon he develops mutant appendages which begin killing the scientists and eventually he transforms into a fully Mutant Bryan. The progression to Mutant Bryan—the Wētā FX team referred to the different stages as Bryan 1, Bryan 1.5 and Bryan 2—included some practical make-up effects and prosthetics for the first stages, including for a reveal of his mutant hand. These were enhanced digitally where necessary. “We had a giant arm that Legacy built,” advises Ongaro, “but it was a little bit too rubbery, and it would hang not straight, so we had to replace that one.”
At this point, Bryan begins developing bulges on his face. “We did that,” says Smith, “by taking the digi-double we needed to have to make Mutant Bryan and tracking that to his face with a different set of paint on it, and doing that as a kind of a 2.5D solution. That was great because then Bryan could just give his performance, and we could modify only the areas of the face that we needed to.”
“There were a lot of story changes in the third act,” continues Smith,” and there was one shot in particular where one of Bryan’s tentacles shoots out and grabs a scientist by the head and smashes her into the ceiling. Austin’s performance on the day was a bit of an angry performance because that seemed to make sense. But then they really wanted to lean into this slow transformation of Bryan and his internal struggle against the monster taking over. So for that shot, they needed Bryan to have a bit of a more confused look on his face. We were putting the sores on his face, and we had just replaced him everywhere except his eyes, nose, mouth. For that moment, we just animated the eyes differently and gave him a bit of a different eyebrow and eye performance and replaced the eyes to change that performance.”
Mutant Bryan’s pulling of the scientist into the ceiling causes smoke to be emitted and fill up the room. “Originally,” outlines Ongaro, “we wanted to keep it all obscured and just keep the silhouette of Bryan, and not reveal the monster until later, but as we were working on it, we said, ‘We are missing him. We want him back.’ So we ended up building this progression that was a fully CG character. Even when you see his face that’s actually a CG creature.”
A FACS-based digi-double of Abrams as Mutant Bryan had always been part of the plan for Mutant Bryan, albeit mostly obscured. When story changes occurred and unplanned fully CG shots were necessary, that required re-visiting Abrams’ performance after principal photography had already wrapped. This was carried out at Eyeline on the studio’s volumetric capture stage.
“It’s a stage they have in LA which has more than 200 robot-driven cameras and they capture all the angles, following a mocap marker on Austin’s back,” explains Ongaro. “From there, you have different options. Nowadays, there is 4D Gaussian splatting, you could do that route, or you can generate a mesh. And what Eyeline did for us was, we took all the material and we did different takes. Then we started cutting the shots that we wanted based on the performance. Eyeline then processed those meshes for us. Those meshes were basically animated meshes with textures. That was given to Wētā FX. Weta used those ones as a ground truth reference, because they built a digi-double of Bryan that was basically perfect. They used that mesh generated by the performance capture just to check that their animation was matching. Everything was a full CG creature. It was always going to be a fully CG creature when we later crash out of the window and land on the skybridge, but we decided to reveal it early.”
Eyeline provided baked geometry from the performance capture of Abrams that could be used as that ground truth, allowing Wētā FX to use it to nudge the baked geo in place. Wētā FX’s body motion for Mutant Bryan was based on the Eyeline session and the studio’s own motion capture. “It was a great way to get that performance of Austin captured,” notes Smith. “But at the end of the day, it was just reference. We used it as a ground truth for what our facial rig needed to do.”
“We just used it for the shapes,” reinforces Reynolds, who notes that the final creature was also heavily keyframed. “But [the capture data from Eyeline] was great to have. It was a great guide. Facial animation’s still one of the hardest things to do in visual effects, that is, believable real-life facial animation. So it was a good stepping stone to get us going.”
Ongaro was particularly pleased with the results on Mutant Bryan, although initially he admits he was worried about going full-CG earlier than planned. “I was telling Zach, ‘I don’t know how close we can get to him.’ And then Wētā FX also said, ‘I don’t know how close we can get!’ They were sending us these shots that were so wide. I said, ‘Push in. I can see the quality is there. Just get closer, get closer.’ And we started getting closer and closer and closer, because it just held up so well.”
