For those who don’t know the studio: Lux Aeterna delivers documentary and natural history VFX including CG environments, FX, and compositing, and it mixes scanned data with CG for shows made with broadcasters and streamers.

History likes receipts

Historical reconstruction only works when the images carry the same authority as the research. The studio leans on archaeological reference, field documentation, and specialist feedback to keep reconstructions grounded, especially when the brief asks for ancient humans that look plausible in stills and in sequence work.

Two recent projects show how far that approach goes. Secrets of the Neanderthals needed a cave interior rebuild and physical remains that read like real bones. Human pushed further, asking for early human avatars built from actor scans and refined against scientific consultation, plus maps and timelines driven by datasets.

Bones first, drama second

For the Neanderthal work, the team recreated the interior of Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq, the site of one of the largest ever discoveries of Neanderthal remains. It used a mix of reference drawings, photographs, and expert advice from professors at the University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University to guide accuracy, including cases where remains had been damaged or moved from their original positions.

Skeleton placement used inverse kinematics so the bones could interact with the ground in a natural way. The pipeline also dealt with scan data arriving as a 3D point cloud, then converting it into polygons that could support a usable cave reconstruction. That conversion problem tends to separate demo reels from production, because bad meshing reads instantly, even when the camera does not linger.

Point clouds, polygons, and the cave that ate your schedule

The cave build started with LiDAR scans that came in as a 3D point cloud. The team developed algorithms to convert the points into polygons for the reconstruction, then used Houdini to isolate areas of scan data so the mesh could be assembled and recombined like a 3D jigsaw. That kind of procedure-heavy work sits squarely in the Houdini mindset: build repeatable ops, then iterate until the scan stops looking like scan data and starts looking like a place.

The result aims for a CG environment that matches the real location closely enough that it can carry the weight of the story, while also supporting the additional CG work needed for the remains and the shot context. In a documentary pipeline, that matters because the images often sit right next to photography, maps, and archive material, with no cinematic lighting trickery to hide behind.

Lux Aeterna delivered 60 shots for a single series, and that number matters because it hints at the production scale when planning resources. WE might e talking about geological and evolutionary tiespans in the story, but delivery is far more rapid.

Full bodies: photogrammetry, casting, and millimetre arguments

The later project asked for historically accurate avatars built from scans of real performers, refined with skeletal research and scientific input. It was a five-part series produced by BBC Studios Science Unit for the BBC and PBS NOVA, hosted by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, and it frames visual effects as a way to tell a story spanning hundreds of thousands of years without a written record.

The workflow combined ultra-high-resolution body scans with iterative model refinements guided by BBC Studios and scientific advisors. It worked with London-based scanning studio Sample & Hold, which describes custom head and body photogrammetry systems and a photogrammetry robot for objects. In practice, that puts photogrammetry into the same category as any other acquisition step: controlled capture, predictable output, and a pipeline that can survive the boring parts like data cleanup and repeat scans.

The stated goal was four historically accurate avatars representing Jebel Irhoud, Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, and Homo erectus, based on scientific data and real-world actors. Alongside the character work, the project also required prehistoric environments and landscapes to show migration and later disappearance of early human life across the globe. The work targets ancient humans, but it does not tolerate ancient guesswork.

Maps, timelines, and the part nobody notices until it breaks

A second strand of the work focused on animated maps and timelines that visualised migration, development, and disappearance across millennia. The graphics are being built using datasets provided by BBC Studios Science Unit researchers and scientific consultants, and not as speculative graphics.

One specific challenge involved changing coastlines and submerged landmasses, where the team created transitions and overlays to keep the visuals clear while staying scientifically accurate. That is the kind of “small” work that carries a lot of editorial risk: the map has to be readable, the timing has to serve the cut, and the choices have to stay consistent across episodes.

On the delivery scale, the project description states sixty crafted shots across five hour-long episodes, and it frames the approach as avoiding prosthetics and overly stylised effects while using a hybrid of photogrammetry, consultation, and minimalist Compositing.

What to take away if you do this for a living

If your job involves building reconstructions that sit next to real-world evidence, the takeaway is simple: acquisition quality and reference discipline decide how much time you spend “fixing” later. Scan data arrives noisy, research notes arrive detailed, and schedules arrive optimistic. The pipeline has to translate all three into images that read as plausible without distracting from the content. And as always, test any new workflow, plugin, or automation step on a throwaway shot before you bet a delivery on it. Just like with rare fossils, you don’t want to play loose with the materials.

https://www.lavfx.com/
https://www.lavfx.com/secrets-of-the-neanderthals
https://www.lavfx.com/blog/human

P.S. You have NO idea how big the challenge was not to replace “Ancient Humans” and “Prehistoric” with the users of one ore more DCC-packages….

The post Lux Aeterna rebuilds ancient humans first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In nuce: The BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) has released a ten-minute Behind the Scenes video for the third season of the series His Dark Materials; the video focuses on the creature effects of the series season and is entitled “Populating the Worlds”.

In toto: The series is based on the three-part series of novels ( The Golden Compass, The Magic Knife, The Amber Telescope) by British author Philip Pullmann; the books deal with the dangers of dogmatic religiosity in an exciting fictional way. In the video, actors Ruth Wilson, Amir Wilson and James McAvoy talk about what it’s like to work with puppeteers on a film set. Visual effects supervisor Russell Dodgson (Framestore) also has his say; Dodgson talks about the ever-growing challenges for his team – from season to season of His Dark Materials. Executive Producer and Production Designer Joel Collins ( The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Black Mirror, London Has Fallen) asks how it was possible to transfer the complete bestiary from Philip Pullmann’s original book into the series adaptation. Creature FX supervisor Brian Fisher also provides insights into the puppetry of the animal ensemble.

Click to continue: “So much animal stuff!” was also featured in our retro article by Mirja Fürst on 27.07.2022 . An in-depth expert discussion with Cinesite supervisor Andy Morley about the first part of the Harry Potter film Fantastic Beasts.

Bringing the creatures of Series 3 to life – Behind the Scenes | His Dark Materials – BBC

The post His Dark Materials | Featurette first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: This is the first season of the four-episode BBC series “Ridley Road”, which retells the story of Jewish opposition to British fascism in the 1960s. The series is based on the novel of the same name by author Jo Bloom, who made her debut as a writer with the work, previously worked as a communications specialist in public relations and now works as a freelance learning designer.

Click on: The VFXs right here below were provided by the studio “Realtime”, on whose website an extra page was opened for “Ridley Road”, on which VFX supervisor Sue Land, among others, comments on the circumstances of the BBC series. In our opinion: Worth seeing, historically valuable series fodder, far removed from superhero kitsch or comedy slapstick.

Ridley Road — Realtime

 

The post Ridley Road | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In the VR experience of “Ghost in the Shell”, the viewer is transported into Major’s world via the VR headset. Using the controllers, the viewer can create a glitch effect or slow down time. You can see Major’s fight against robot geishas, experience a deep dive and fall from a rooftop. The experience was realised by the REWIND studio from England in cooperation with the production studio Here Be Dragons, Oculus, Paramount and Dreamworks. We tested the experience at this year’s FMX and then met up with REWIND founder and CEO Solomon Rogers for an interview.

REWIND was founded six years ago as an animation and VFX studio. The team has been focussing on virtual and mixed reality as well as 360-degree projects for around three years, but as a content studio it also continues to realise post-production jobs of all kinds. The “Ghost in the Shell” experience was realised at REWIND with a team of 15 people in a very tight time frame of 7 weeks, which also included motion capture shoots.

DP: How did REWIND’s focus on VR come about?

Solomon Rogers: We started working on VR projects and experiences shortly after the launch of the Xbox One. When the first Oculus Rift DK1 was launched, we quickly realised that we could use this technology for all kinds of projects in the architecture, education and entertainment sectors. From that point on, we focussed on VR productions.

DP: What did your software pipeline for the VR project “Ghost in the Shell” look like?

Solomon Rogers: We used everything (laughs): 3ds Max and Maya were used for the modelling, Houdini was used for all the particle effects, fluid dynamics and the holograms, plus a bit of ZBrush and Mudbox. The Unreal Engine was the core tool for the delivery, and we used Unity for the Gear VR version.

DP: Why did you use two different engines?

Solomon Rogers: During testing, we found that the Unreal Engine delivered the best results on the Rift. But we couldn’t run a real-time engine on the Gear VR, so we mixed a stereoscopic 360-degree render with interactive elements on top. This worked very well for Unity because the material was really lightweight this way.

DP: How many assets did you create for the “Ghost in the Shell” experience?

Solomon Rogers: I can’t give you an exact number, but there are four main characters and three key scenes: the one on the roof terrace, the tea room and the shell sequence at the end.

DP: Did you have to build the assets from scratch or did you have models from the film to work from?

Solomon Rogers: We received numerous references from the trailer and the initial artwork, which provided a good basis. We also received film assets and 3D scan files from some VFX vendors, but these were far too high resolution to work with in the engine, so they only served as a reference.

DP: There’s this huge city backdrop that you can see from the roof terrace. How did you create it?

Solomon Rogers: We tried to get as close as possible to the look of the film. We built the nearby building models all by hand in Maya and Houdini, the more distant city backdrops were created with lots of matte paintings, and the compositing was done with Nuke. The hologram figures between the buildings come from the film, we received them as Houdini files. But it was a very complicated process until we got them to work in the right 3D form in Unreal. We rendered them as animated flipbooks from Houdini and then used the depth data to generate a displacement map that we ran in the engine. So the 3D object is actually just a texture.

DP: The experience of falling from the roof of the house was very interesting. How did you achieve that?

Solomon Rogers: It’s actually just a very small turn of 30 degrees. As soon as you play with the horizon in VR, people feel shaky. We used this effect as a narrative tool in the experience. We carried out tests with test subjects, many of whom actually fell over (laughs). Using the real-time engine, we were able to test what felt best at all times and stayed at 30 degrees because in this case it was enough to feel a little falling, but not too much.

DP: How much freedom did you have in the design, for example with the time slowdown or the glitch effect?

Solomon Rogers: The design was between us and HBD, their creative directors and we worked closely together through the whole process. They were very good at directing great ideas, so not many checks from the production companies were needed. With our project, we didn’t have to stick too closely to the ideas of the film because it’s an autonomous VR setting, a small part of the fantasy of the whole Ghost in the Shell universe that stands on its own.

DP: Your original concept envisaged more interactivity. What was planned?

Solomon Rogers: Actually, the viewer was supposed to get weapons and fight his way through the scenery. In the timefreeze scenes, he could have thought about the best way to kill the bad guys.

DP: What was the output like for the different platforms?

Solomon Rogers: The Rift version has a tougher minimum specification, which caused difficulties because the experience had to run smoothly on Unreal. Nevertheless, the final version wasn’t too big in the end at a few gigabytes. The version for the Gear VR had a UHD resolution and was 600 megabytes in size. For Facebook, we created a 6K x 6K stereo video with spatial audio.

DP: What output did the material come out of the engine with?

Solomon Rogers: We exported the experience from Unreal at 16K x 16K. We chose this resolution so that we could downscale it to 8K and 4K for the Gear VR, and the size we chose allowed us to achieve very high quality.

DP: In contrast to other VR experiences, which often appear very blurred and pixelated, this problem was not apparent in the “Ghost in the Shell” experience. How did you manage that?

Solomon Rogers: Due to the two stereo images in the headset, the image is unfortunately often somewhat blurred. That’s why we sharpened the images slightly in post-production, in addition to the fact that many scenes in the “Ghost in the Shell” experience are very dark. This allowed us to concentrate primarily on achieving higher quality in the more brightly lit areas, but at the same time some very beautiful things are unfortunately hidden in the darkness.

DP: Overall, what was the biggest challenge of the project?

Solomon Rogers: Definitely the time. But also getting the motion capture to work and look smooth on so many characters in one scene at the same time. This project taught us a lot about motion capturing in VR.

DP: What were the reasons why the project time of seven weeks was so extremely short?

Solomon Rogers: I wish I knew. At first we turned the project down because of the tight deadline, because we felt the amount of work couldn’t be done in that time frame. But our team loves “Ghost in the Shell”. They really wanted to do the project and were prepared to put in long working days for it. So we decided to take on the project after all and called them back.

DP: Which experience was more complicated to realise: “Ghost in the Shell” or the BBC spacewalk “Home”?

Solomon Rogers: ” Ghost in the Shell” was challenging because of the time pressure and the extensive motion capturing. But it works linearly, the viewer is only shown a story, which made it easier than “Home” in terms of interactivity. The BBC Spacewalk was a ground-breaking VR project that had never been realised before in this way. The story had to put the user at the centre and suggest that they are free to make their own decisions and have full control. We had to move and play in the grey area between pure storytelling and a game.

The post VR Deep Diving | Retro-Article first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

The Watch

In the BBC series The Watch – based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels – a group of misfits put their various heads together to avert an impending catastrophe. The series is set in Ankh-Morpork, perhaps the most important city in Pratchett’s Discworld universe.

In the VFX breakdown below, a cute dragon in the shape of a golden hamster grows into a city centre-destroying prince of flames. Please put on your fire-retardant waistcoat before clicking play!

The Watch: VFX creature breakdown

The post The Watch | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.