The recently aired Season 2, Episode 9 of the Fox Network’s The Orville featured an epic space battle that rivaled – and arguably surpassed – those seen previously in the Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica television series. Working under the guidance of production visual effects supervisor Luke McDonald and visual effects producer Brooke Noska, FuseFX visual effects supervisor Tommy Tran and his team delivered all but about a minute of the space battle within a remarkably short eight-week time frame, without compromising anything in terms of dynamism and realism.

Created by and starring Seth MacFarlane, The Orville is, at one level, a space comedy loosely based on Star Trek; but MacFarlane and everyone associated with the show, including the visual effects teams, fully understand that satire works best when the core elements of the subject being satirized are duplicated with precision and specificity. “Comedy or not,” said Tommy Tran, “this space battle had to look and feel like a dramatic space battle, without crossing the boundary from sci-fi reality to absurdity. The sequence does pay homage to the ‘red shirt guy’ from Star Trek, and there is also a Top Gun moment in there; but other than that, the space battle was presented as cinematically as possible.”

Watch the space battle in this clip from The Orville:

In addition to the Orville starship, the sequence features Kaylon, and Krill spaceships and fighters. Though the angular, green Krill ships had been seen previously on the show – their designs already well established – the Kaylon fleet was only introduced in Part 1 of Episode 9. Pixomondo, another vendor on The Orville, built CG models from Kaylon ship designs by in-house digital effects supervisor Brandon Fayette. “Brandon is a very talented CG artist,” said Tran, “and he worked with Seth starting on Season 1 to design the look of every ship in the Union fleet, the Krill fleet, and the Kaylon fleet. However, FuseFX did design the space station from a basic concept, as well as the little robot ships that repair the larger ships.”

Integrating the Maya assets provided by Pixomondo required the use of optimization tools developed by FuseFX as a means of producing shots quickly and efficiently – crucial, given the company’s eight-week schedule. “Our pipeline TD, Changsoo Eun, created a tool that allowed us to auto-populate the shots before they went to the lighters,” Tran said. “So all the tracking data was there, and all the CG assets were there. Without that, we would have had to manually bring in hundreds of ships and place them in 3D space, which would have been daunting.”

The optimization tools enabled shots to be auto-populated not only with ships but also with explosions and space debris. “We looked at several recent films to get a sense of the look and feel of space battle scenes – the look of fireballs and explosions and so on,” recalled Tran. “That’s where we started. From there, I sat the effects artists down for about two weeks to do nothing but make small, medium and large explosions, fireballs and debris. Then Changsoo took all those assets we’d pre-built for the explosions and put them into a library. He wrote some code, so when the lighters needed an explosion, they could just go to the drop-down menu and find a fully rendered Houdini explosion we could plug in anywhere in 3D space.

“We did the same thing for space debris – bits and pieces of broken ships. We sat our modelers down for a couple of days, and said, ‘Run several varying destruction simulations.’ Each asset then was categorized in our library; and so, when the lighter needed to fill the background with space debris, he just went to the drop-down menu through our pipeline. Doing that, we could populate shots with varying amounts of space debris. That was a very robust feature. We’ve been able to auto-populate scenes before but not at this level. It was like we’d auto-populated trees in a park before; but for this, we had to auto-populate Yosemite National Forest!”

In the end, the space battle was such a monumental task, Tran brought in the help of FuseFX visual effects supervisor Kevin Lingenfelser. “He ran part of the episode with me,” Tran said. “We just split it – I’ll do this, you do that. It was a big help; the task was bigger than any one supervisor could manage That’s the thing I’m most proud of – that we were able to deliver that incredible sequence in eight weeks, to the quality that we did. We did it through optimization and teamwork and communication. We did it through working smarter, not harder.”