CGChannel posted a short piece today on ReDefine’s VFX breakdown for Ikkis, Sriram Raghavan’s film about Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal — India’s youngest Param Vir Chakra recipient, killed at 21 defending a bridgehead during the Battle of Basantar in December 1971. The title means “twenty-one” in Hindi. The write-up calls the tank combat sequences visceral, which tracks with everything else reported about the shoot: the production built functional replica tanks — Centurion and Patton, the two types that actually fought at Basantar — from scratch, over roughly eight months, specifically so the actors could be filmed driving and firing from real machines instead of a greenscreen stage.
That order of operations is the part worth sitting with. Most coverage of a VFX breakdown treats CG as the thing that made the sequence possible. Here it’s the opposite: the practical build is what made the sequence readable, and the VFX exists to do the things eight months of fabrication couldn’t.
Why you build the tank before you render it
A tracked vehicle is one of the hardest objects to fake convincingly at full scale, and not for the reasons a hard-surface artist usually worries about. It’s not the model — a Centurion’s hull and turret are straightforward geometry by tank standards. It’s what the vehicle does to everything around it. Forty-plus tonnes of steel on tracks displaces ground in a way that’s specific and hard to fake: dust doesn’t billow, it gets punched out sideways in short bursts timed to the track’s contact with the earth. The hull doesn’t glide, it pitches and yaws over uneven terrain with a mass that reads in how slowly it settles. And a real tank interior gives you real bounce, real engine vibration, and real light bouncing off gun-metal at angles a lighting rig would otherwise have to invent frame by frame. An actor braced against an actual hull, lit by an actual sky, is a reference no simulation fully replaces — it’s why practical vehicle builds still win out over CG ones on almost any war film with a budget to support them.
What a practical build can’t give you is scale. Basantar was fought by armoured regiments, not two tanks in a field — the historical engagement involved dozens of vehicles across a wide front. You don’t build sixty functional replicas; you build a handful of hero units the camera gets close to, and VFX does the rest: multiplying the tank count for wide shots, adding the muzzle flashes and impact debris that are safer simulated than staged live around a working vehicle, extending the terrain past what the location could offer, and matching digital-tank material response — the gun-metal specularity, the dust caking into the tracks, the same battle damage progressing consistently — to whatever the practical units were built and lit to look like. That last one is the actual hand-off point between the art department and the VFX team: the CG tanks aren’t a separate design, they’re a texture and shading match-target against physical reference that already exists on set, which is a much narrower and more disciplined brief than building a hero asset from a concept sheet.
The tell is in what doesn’t get automated
It’s a good discipline to notice which decisions get made with a fabrication shop and which get made with a render farm, because the split usually maps to which qualities the human eye actually catches. Weight, contact and occlusion under strong sunlight are things audiences clock instinctively even if they can’t name what’s wrong — they’re exactly what a physical object gives you for free and a simulation has to earn. Scale, quantity and anything genuinely too dangerous to stage live are the opposite: things an audience accepts as CG without penalty, because there’s no equally strong physical intuition to violate. Ikkis apparently drew that line the way most serious war productions do — real hardware for what the camera and the actor touch, digital hardware for what the story needs more of than a production could safely or affordably build.
Everything above comes from CGChannel’s brief coverage of ReDefine’s breakdown and separately reported details on the production’s tank-building process — I haven’t seen the full breakdown video or the film itself, so treat the specifics of ReDefine’s actual VFX pipeline as unconfirmed beyond what’s been reported.