COORDINATING CHAOS

Those lasers, and a number of subsequent ship collisions, cause some hefty explosions. Depending on the type of ship, FuseFX came up with specific ways to handle explosions and debris. “For the Kaylon spheres, for instance,” says Von Brock, “they’re so large that when they blew up we made it like a chain reaction – it took multiple blasts and multiple explosions to tear them up. So these tended to disintegrate over time, while a smaller ship involved just small ‘pop’ explosions. We also had a library of explosions and blasts for background action.”

One particularly elaborate explosion sees a Krill ship explode into green flames. “It was getting pelted by the interceptors and eventually blows up,” says Von Brock. “If that had been a normal explosion it would have had orange fire and debris. But their color scheme is green, so we thought, let’s say they have a green, reactive nuclear core, so when that thing blows it must be green energy. We threw it across to Seth as a work in progress, and he loved it!”

FuseFX was aided in generating these complex scenes by several custom tools that were written to proceduralize the battle shots and enable them to be done within eight weeks. These included a tool to help ingest previs into FuseFX’s scenes, as Tran explains.

“One of the challenges we had when they delivered the previs was sometimes they had 60-plus ships in there, and they were just proxy models that the client sent over. We had tools that would bring all the setups in, but originally we would have to identify the position and location of all the assets and replace them with our ships. So we had a tool written for the artists to build a scene from the library with all those explosions, hits and things like that. We had a library of debris so artists could almost paint debris into their scenes.”

The result was a compelling sequence that made the most of FuseFX’s toolkit, and helped put on the screen an ambitious battle that had been envisaged by the show’s production team. And despite such a fast turnaround, FuseFX says the process was a memorable one.

“I have to say that working with this client has been very easy and wonderful for me because previous experiences haven’t gone as smoothly as this one has, so that also made our work on the show that much easier,” says Lingenfelser. “We were working with a very well-tuned machine and people who respected the choices that we were making and allowed us to make the sequence that much better for it.”