For those who don’t know the tool: Boris FX Sapphire is a multi host VFX plug-in suite for editors and compositors, used in After Effects, Premiere, Media Composer, and OpenFX hosts like Resolve, Flame, and Nuke.

Defocus that tries to behave like glass

Boris FX ships Sapphire 2026.5 with a new effect called Advanced Defocus, built to recreate lens blur character rather than just blur pixels. In Sapphire, artists can start from presets, including ones built from real-world lens references and more stylised options, then dial in Defocus Width plus relative width and height for anamorphic style stretching.

Advanced Defocus focuses on the lens kernel, where artists shape bokeh as circles, polygons with adjustable sides and roundness, or custom shapes. It also includes controls to introduce imperfections tied to aperture blades, such as adjustable blade notches, as well as options for colour fringing and noise. The tool targets everything from cheap, dirty glass to high-end primes, depending on how far you push those controls.

The lens vignette section adds classic edge darkening, but also an optcial vignette control that changes distortion toward the frame edges. A Matte Box control goes past soft cropping by simulating uneven light entry, slightly darkening one side while also clipping individual defocused highlights.

From grungy to clean

Advanced Defocus also includes lens textures that break up overly uniform bokeh, with parameters that range from subtle variation to grungy lens looks. Extra controls include highlight boosting, chromatic-style fringing, and grain management to match the foreground and background.

In Adobe After Effects, Advanced Defocus appears under Effect in the Sapphire Blur plus Sharpen category. The effect can work as a straight lens emulation pass, a stylised motion graphics treatment, or a transition building block. A workflow shown in Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Fusion uses Advanced Defocus to soften a keyed background for more believable depth, then adds sensor-style grain to help match elements. Another workflow in After Effects links defocus controls across layers, uses Affect Alpha to defocus type with the background, and offsets values to keep the illusion that typography sits closer to camera.

For edits, Advanced Defocus can also drive transitions inside VEGAS Pro by building an S Transition in the Sapphire Builder variant designed for transitions. That approach ties animation to the transition length on the timeline rather than keyframing, and then applies the same peak values to both incoming and outgoing clips.

Glare gets a rebuild, and flares get louder

Sapphire 2026.5 reworks S_Glare with smoother rendering, richer spectral color, and updated parameters including highlight isolation, cleaner rays, and more natural falloff, plus new styles that widen the look range beyond traditional glare.

In Adobe After Effects, S_Glare sits under the Lighting category and behaves the same across Sapphire hosts. The first control to touch is Threshold: raise it for fewer glares, lower it for more, and expect wildly different results depending on the footage. Sapphire 2026.5 also changes what the defaults look like compared with older versions, so the same effect can start from a different baseline than legacy installs.

Presets matter a lot for S_Glare, but the preview can mislead. Results change with viewer zoom level, so checking at 100 percent gives a more reliable read before you commit. Presets also store Threshold, so loading a preset often means rebalancing Threshold right away to avoid either nothing happening or everything exploding.

If glares drift or slip onto areas you do not want, Threshold Blur becomes the other big lever. Lowering Threshold Blur picks up many more points of interest, which can reduce slippage but may add jitter. A practical balancing rule shown here is: when Blur comes down, Threshold goes up, then you fine-tune from there.

Sapphire includes integrated Mocha inside the effect for masking control. A workflow shown here uses an object brush and Mask ML to generate a mask, then inverts the Mocha mask so glare stays in the scene but stops emanating from a subject.

S_Glare also appears as an embedded component in S_NightSky, where you can open the glare editor, load glare presets, and adjust glare size to customise the look directly within the NightSky effect.

Procedural ridges, more presets, faster stacking

A new Texture Ridges effect generates ridge-like patterns from noise, with controls for octave scaling, speed, frequency, contrast, and layering to build animated surface detail and abstract motion design textures. Sapphire 2026.5 also adds more than 100 new and improved presets, including anime, sci-fi, and abstract fractal motion graphics looks.

Effect Builder gets an interface update aimed at faster custom effect and transition creation, plus new built-in Dots and Noise tools. If you build stacks for repeatable looks, this is the part worth a quiet test session before you let it touch client shots.

Pricing and updates

Sapphire ships as a plug-in collection with subscriptions, upgrade and support plans, and perpetual licenses. Subscriptions start at 545 US dollars per year or 80 US dollars per month. Customers with current Sapphire or Boris FX Suite subscriptions, or with Sapphire upgrade and support plans, get the 2026.5 release obviously as a free update. If you aren’t sure: get the free Trialversion. As always, test new tools and presets in your own pipeline before you rely on them in production.

https://borisfx.com/products/sapphire/#whats-new

The post Boris FX Sapphire 2026.5 adds Advanced Defocus first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the event (Even if that seems strange, after the many many times we reported on it): FMX is a spring conference in Stuttgart for animation, altime, games and VFX, built around talks, panels, workshops, and an expo, tied to Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

A 30th birthday, and a hand on the baton

Behind the FMX..

This just in: After the 2026 edition of FMX, Mario Müller will hand over leadership to Agon Ushaku. Müller announced a year ago that the current edition would be his last, and the 30th edition now becomes a guided transition, with Ushaku accompanying him during the event.

The move keeps the tradition intact while still giving the community time to say a proper thank you to Müller after 15 years of building, shaping and evolving the event’s exceptional international scope.

A familiar face steps into the spotlight

Agon Ushaku (LinkedIn) has spent more than 25 years working across CGI and VFX in production, management, and education. He currently serves as Global Director of Nomination Events at the Visual Effects Society (and as VES Germany Chair Emeritus) and curates the international Megabrain Masterclass series, has been an animago Juror, and is one of those faces everybody knows.

Ushaku calls FMX his most important place for networking for almost three decades, and says he has attended pretty much every edition as visitor and speaker. If you have been around FMX for any amount of time, chances are you have already bumped into him, talked shop, or traded recommendations on whom to talk to and where to get the best coffee.

Keeping the spirit, and raising the bar

Agons’s career includes almost 16 years leading CAD and 3D visualisation plus product and data management at Unexpected GmbH. He most recently worked as Senior CG and 3D consultant and CAD manager at POLYGRAIL GmbH.

He is taking over the FMX project manager role as a personal mission, and has plans around building on the event’s foundation while maintaining high standards for quality and innovation, in a moment when AI and realtime workflows reshape production in an even more turbulent industry.

On stage at FMX 2026

During FMX 2026, Ushaku will appear on the panel Ethics in AI with Matt Buehler from vrbn, Reka Kaloczy, and Ben Lock from Moonvalley.

The post FMX gehts a new head for the 30th Birthday first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the event: FMX is a production conference for animation and Visual Effects, mixing craft talks with pipeline sessions. It touches audio post, cinematography, and realtime tools such as Unreal.

Sound design: not an afterthought

Sound Design at FMX lands as a full track, built around immersive, interactive, and animated work where audio carries story weight. The track description positions sound as half the experience, then drills into fundamentals, standout projects, and where AI can help in early creative phases and where it fails.

The program brings in Supervising Sound Editor Nina Hartstone of Cinphonic, with a session on storytelling with sound that centers on recording, design, and editorial choices for film. Her listed credits include Bohemian Rhapsody, Moonage Daydream, Saltburn, and Wuthering Heights. She also teaches masterclasses at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg during the On Campus day, with limited participation and registration handled via program@fmx.de.

Supervising Re Recording Mixer David Fluhr brings a workflow talk tied to Walt Disney Animation Studios and the realities of modern delivery. The session covers sound, music, and mixing workflows that support storytelling, plus worldwide deliveries, language versioning, and the path from temp to final mix using sequences from Vaiana 2 and Zoomania 2.

A third session attacks the handoff between picture and audio. Christoph Groß-Fengels demonstrates an AI driven workflow that watches an edit, extracts key frames, sends them to a vision system via the Google Cloud Vision API, then searches a local sound effects library and assembles a first pass sound bed. The pipeline uses a Python workflow designed to slot into existing post pipelines. Try it, break it, then try it again before you trust it with a worklfow that ships.

Cinematography: where VFX changes the job

The Cinematography track adds Paul Cameron for a career conversation about the influence of VFX on visual design, in conversation with Jordan Thistlewood of Cooke Optics. Cameron’s credits include Westworld, Collateral, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales, and the talk is supposed to circle around collaboration from on set through post.

Spatial Storytelling: XR wants story first

A first time Spatial Storytelling track focuses on XR narrative craft across film, theater, and games, with an explicit mandate to keep story ahead of shiny tech.

Alex Coulombe of Agile Lens and director David Gochfeld present virtual production workflows behind A Christmas Carol VR and R and D with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their talk “Live to Media framework” that captures live performance motion capture and preserves it via the Unreal Engine 5 Replay System, aiming for scalable, repeatable immersive content.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru of NUMENA argues for space as the medium in VR, contrasting references ranging from the Acropolis to Half Life’s City 17, and exploring scale transitions as narrative devices with examples including Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and the Venice Biennale project titled Dear Mother.

Balthazar Auxietre of InnerspaceVR focuses on environmental narrative in immersive experiences and outlines practical design techniques and workflows, including use of Gravity Sketch, with an emphasis on balancing cinematic direction and user agency.

Robyn Winfield-Smith discusses narrative work in Apple’s 180 degree immersive format using the Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive camera developed specifically for Apple Vision Pro. The session description covers story development and previsualisation, stereoscopic workflows, scenic elements to guide attention, spatial audio considerations, and the future of spatial entertainment. The supplied details do not provide technical camera specifications.

Dates, formats, and what you can actually watch

FMX runs On Site May 5 to May 7, with Online and On Campus on May 8, and On Demand from May 9 through June 9. The ticket page has all kinds of pass types including Conference Pass, Business Pass, Combi Pass, Day Pass, Experience Pass, Online Pass, and Press Pass.

Two evening get togethers round out the schedule. Tuesday, May 5 runs 19:00 to 21:00 and is powered by Houdini (Meet your favourite Digital Production Editor there). Wednesday May 6 runs 19:00 to 21:00 and is powered by ROE Visual.

The post FMX 2026 bets on sound and spatial craft first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Pixomondo is set to be wound down, with Sony Pictures Entertainment sharing an intent to eventually close the Pixomondo umbrella and integrate some capabilities into other areas of its business. The VFX operation will close after completion of outstanding projects or contracts. After that, internal VFX efforts will be streamlined to focus on Sony Pictures Imageworks. And this a mere five years after the frantic Covid-Boom.

The virtual production division called Clara will also be wound down after outstanding contracts are fulfilled. There is stated potential for some business initiatives associated with Sony Group Corporation to be transferred over. The specific initiatives and destinations are not detailed. The R&D and innovation segment called PXO Innovation will be absorbed by Sony Group Corporation R&D. Staff were informed of these moves on March 19, 2026. Official channels are silent so far.

Strange New Virtual Production Worlds!

What the studio worked on

The studio specialized in visualization, virtual production and VFX, with credits listed including Hugo, multiple seasons of Game of Thrones, The Boys, and John Wick: Chapter 4 and many more.

Its LED virtual production work is listed as including Star Trek: Discovery & Strange New Worlds, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Reacher and Cada Minuto Cuenta – seven creative studios and four LED volumes (Vancouver, LA, Toronto and Rhyad) across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada.

What changes

The sequencing matters: the closures are framed to happen after outstanding contracts are fulfilled. That implies current deliveries continue before the doors close, but it does not spell out how teams, supervision, or facilities operate during the runout. On the VFX side, the operational headline is a stated internal consolidation toward Sony Pictures Imageworks. The report does not specify whether that means changes to bidding, staffing, toolchains, or how virtual production handoffs interface with final-shot work.

On the virtual production side, Clara is slated to wind down as well, with only a high-level note that some initiatives tied to Sony Group Corporation could be transferred. It does not clarify whether LED volume capacity is repurposed, reassigned, or closed outright.

Sony Pictures Entertainment akquiriert Pixomondo

Leadership notes

Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired the business in 2022 from Mayfair Equity Partners. CEO Jonny Slow first became global chief executive officer in 2019 and announced his exit from the company in February 2026.

https://www.televisual.com/news/sony-pictures-to-wind-down-pixomondo/

The post Sony to wind down Pixomondo first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the Event: The Visual Effects Society is the industry’s professional body for VFX artists and supervisors. Its annual VES Awards recognise work across film, episodic, animation, realtime and emerging technology.

The 24th Annual VES Awards took place on 25 February 2026, honouring visual effects work across 24 competitive categories, alongside two special awards. The ceremony recognises artists, supervisors and teams working in film, episodic television, commercials, games, real-time projects and special venue productions. The Society currently represents more than 5,500 members in over 50 countries and now spans 18 regional Sections worldwide . The Awards are presented by the Visual Effects Society, founded in 1997.

This year’s VES Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to producer Jerry Bruckheimer, “the most successful film and television producer of all time” and a career spanning more than 50 years, with credits including the Pirates of the Caribbean, Top Gun, National Treasure and Bad Boys franchises . His recent productions cited in the programme include F1, Top Gun: Maverick and Bad Boys: Ride or Die.

The VES Visionary Award was presented to Sir Richard Taylor, co-founder of Wētā Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. TWētā Workshop has provided design and physical effects for more than 160 films, numerous television shows and multiple location-based experiences . Taylor is credited with five Academy Awards across special effects makeup, visual effects and costume design.

Full winners list

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature: Avatar: Fire and Ash; Richard Baneham, Peter Litvack, Eric Saindon, Nicky Muir, Steve Ingram.

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature: Sinners; Michael Ralla, James Alexander, Nick Marshall, Espen Nordahl, Donnie Dean.

Outstanding Animation in an Animated Feature: KPop Demon Hunters; Joshua Beveridge, Jacky Priddle, Benjamin Hendricks, Clara Chan.

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode: Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age; “The Big Freeze”; Russell Dodgson, Tracey Gibbons, François Dumoulin, Gavin McKenzie.

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode: The Residence; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Seth Hill, Tesa Kubicek, John Nelson, Gabriel Vargas.

Outstanding Visual Arts in a Real-Time Project: Ghost of Yōtei; Jason Connell, Matt Vainio, Joanna Wang, Jasmin Patry.

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial: BMW; “Heart of Joy | Meet Okto the Octopus”; Tom Raynor, Helen Tang, Jack Harris, Alex Kulikov.

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project: The Wizard of Oz at Sphere; Ben Grossmann, Tamara Watts Kent, Dr. Irfan Essa, Matt Dougan, Glenn Derry.

Outstanding Character in a Photoreal Feature: Avatar: Fire and Ash; Varang: Leader of the Ash Clan; Stephen Clee, Stuart Adcock, Keven Norris, Joseph Kim.

Outstanding Character in an Animated Feature: KPop Demon Hunters; Rumi; Sophia (Seung Hee) Lee, Andrea Matamoros, Marc Souliere, Joshua Beveridge.

Outstanding Character in an Episodic, Commercial, Game Cinematic, or Real-Time Project: IT: Welcome to Derry; “The Thing in the Dark;” The Pickle Monster; Philip Harris-Genois, Pierric Danjou, Chloé Ostiguy, Jonathan Bourdua.

Outstanding Environment in a Photoreal Feature: Avatar: Fire and Ash; Bridgehead Industrial City; Gianluca Pizzaia, Steve Bevins, Dziga Kaiser, Zsolt Máté.

Outstanding Environment in an Animated Feature: Zootopia 2; Marsh Market; Limei Z. Hshieh, Alexander Nicholas Whang, Joshua Fry, Ryan DeYoung.

Outstanding Environment in an Episodic, Commercial, Game Cinematic, or Real-Time Project: Andor; “Welcome to the Rebellion;” The Senate District; John O’Connell, Falk Boje, Hasan Ilhan, Kevin George.

Outstanding CG Cinematography: Avatar: Fire and Ash; Steve Deane, A.J. Briones, Zachary Brake, Andrew Moffett.

Outstanding Model in a Photoreal or Animated Project: Avatar: Fire and Ash; The Windtraders’ Gondola; Michael Smale, Sam Sharplin, Joe W. Churchill, Jacqi Dillon.

Outstanding Effects Simulations in a Photoreal Feature: Avatar: Fire and Ash; Simulating Pandora; Nicholas James Illingworth, Sarah C. Farmer, James Robinson, Ryan Bowden.

Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Animated Feature: KPop Demon Hunters; Filippo Maccari, Nikolaos Finizio, Daniel La Chapelle, Srdjan Milosevic.

Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Episode, Commercial, Game Cinematic, or Real-Time Project: Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age; The Big Freeze; Edward Ferrysienanda, Kevin Christensen, Guy Schuleman, Kevin Tarpinian.

Outstanding Compositing and Lighting in a Feature: F1: The Movie; Modern Race and POV Footage; Hugo Gauvreau, Chris Davies, Raushan Raj, Amaury Rospars.

Outstanding Compositing and Lighting in an Episode: The Last of Us; “Through the Valley;” A Storm of Ice, Fire and Flesh; Tobias Wiesner, Mark Julien, Owen Longstaff, Brendan Naylor.

Outstanding Compositing and Lighting in a Commercial: BMW; “Heart of Joy | Meet Okto the Octopus”; Alex Kulikov, Jack Harris, Adam Chabane, Nicola Borsari.

Outstanding Special (Practical) Effects in a Photoreal Project: Andor; “Who Are You?”; Luke Murphy, Dean Ford, Jody Eltham, Darrell Guyon.

Emerging Technology Award: Avatar: Fire and Ash; Kora Fire Toolset; Alexey Dmitrievich Stomakhin, John Edholm, Murali Ramachari, Aleksandr Isakov.

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project: Azimuth; Thomas Teisseire, Cassandre Cinier, Martin Bluy, Mathis Giraudeau.

The post VES Awards 2026 names winners and honours first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (HFF Munich) is one of Germany’s leading film schools, offering specialised programmes in directing, production, cinematography, screenwriting, and visual effects. Infinity Hotel is a surrealist short film produced by the school’s VFX students, Vanessa Chu, Vanessa Ramovic, Jim Obmann, Emil Pogolski, Sonja Latussek, and Elena Rid, in collaboration with the departments of Screenwriting and Production. Directed by Professor Matthias Zentner, and supported by Prof. Jürgen Schopper, Prof. Sinje Gebauer and Dr. Rodolfo Anes Silveira, the project combines live-action cinematography, 3D scanning, and digital environments.

A production report by the Students

Written by Vanessa Ramovic, Jim Obmann,
Sonja Latussek, Elena Rid, Emil Pogolski and Vanessa Chu.

After completing our first animated short films as visual effects students at the University of Television and Film Munich, we selected our next joint film project. The basic idea of INFINITY HOTEL, written by students Michael Schwärzler and Jakob Smolinski, immediately suggested weaving reality and surrealism together. Themes such as inner fears and memories accompany our protagonist, Clarence, an insurance salesman travelling from hotel to hotel. He enters a strange hotel room and quickly realises that something about this Infinity Hotel cannot be right. He not only wanders through twisting corridors and distorted staircases, but also through fragments of his own memories, confronting them.

INFINITY HOTEL is a collaborative film project between the VFX students and the screenwriting and production departments at HFF Munich. Directed by Professor Matthias Zentner, the film gave us the opportunity to contribute to many parts of the production process and to realise a story that would hardly exist without visual effects.

Our experiences from the animated short films WOODLAND and LITTLE STAR, created in the first year of study, helped us build on existing knowledge while acquiring new expertise. Unlike full CGI animated short films, the main challenge this time was producing photorealistic assets and shots for a live-action film. The following article reflects on our experiences during production and outlines how the visual effects of INFINITY HOTEL were created.

Concept & Painting!

In the early stages of script development, we explored the visual identity of the mysterious Infinity Hotel. The VFX students designed the protagonist’s childhood living room, the hotel corridors and colour palettes, and created initial storyboard elements for planned VFX sequences. A concept art seminar with Luis Guggenberger encouraged us to give free rein to our imagination and broaden our creative horizons.

Paintings play a central role in the film. Early in production, we gained valuable insight into the work of the production design department through collaboration with Eva Maria Stiebler, who printed our digitally designed paintings onto canvas and brought them to life. Vanessa Ramovic, Vanessa Chu and Emil Pogolski created the paintings that Clarence observes before entering the ominous hotel room.

Each painting exists in two versions, each representing a fragmented glimpse into his memories or dreams. One version might show young Clarence playing with a toy rocket or receiving his stuffed snail from his mother. The second versions depict distorted pasts and desires, such as the boy as a real astronaut, abstracted with a snail shell instead of a head, or alone and silent in his childhood living room without his mother. The paintings act as clues to the character’s past. Four works were digitally painted in Procreate and printed on large canvases by Eva Maria Stiebler, framed in wood for the set. Two additional paintings were created as charcoal drawings on paper.

Comics!

The comic books lying on the hotel room table were illustrated by Vanessa Ramovic and depict the adventurous “Cosmic Knight” Clarence’s childhood hero and career role model. Sonja Latussek animated the Cosmic cartoon shown on the small CRT television behind Clarence using the drawing and animation software Krita. She aligned the hero’s origin story with the comic books and portrayed his journey into space. Each frame was drawn individually, giving the cartoon its distinctive two-dimensional charm. In collaboration with production design, the animation was played back on the television on set.

The Endless Spiral

From the start of pre-production, we aimed to visualise Clarence’s inner emotional state. The red spiral staircase at our second Munich location provided an ideal opportunity to depict his descent into memory. Since the physical set could not accommodate infinite depth, Vanessa and Jim digitally extended the staircase. They captured a 360-degree FARO LiDAR scan of the stairwell, converting the spatial data into a 3D environment.

It was striking to see how precisely the point clouds generated by Faro Scene replicated the physical world. The resulting model was adjusted and extracted in Blender, where Vanessa and Jim animated the structure. The deformation of the staircase was particularly complex and was achieved using a geometry node system in Blender. Vanessa recreated the staircase texture in Substance Painter, based on reference photos taken on location by the entire VFX team.

The final compositing step involved integrating the digital staircase into the original footage. With guidance from lecturer Martin Tallosy, Vanessa learned how to use rotoscoping in Nuke to create nearly invisible transitions between plate and CG elements. Martin supported the integration of CG footage into all VFX shots and helped with initial colour adjustments. Lecturer Ando Avila taught us to track handheld camera movement using 3D Equalizer, enabling Vanessa and Jim to transfer the motion to the digital 3D model. Working closely with our instructors allowed us to explore new tools and combine traditional sets with digital visual effects.

The particular challenge with the spiral staircase was that the real staircase on set did not have a perfect circular shape. This required us to develop a believable transition from the set staircase into our circular CG spiral staircase that extends into depth. It was also meant to feel less steep and cramped than the real-world reference. Another challenge lay in the angles of the steps. On the real staircase, the steps were not perpendicular to the circle’s tangent at their respective positions, but instead met the circular form at a slightly offset angle. For the set extension, however, we wanted an aesthetic solution that would integrate more harmoniously into the staircase. Our goal was therefore to build a transition in which the skewed angles of the set staircase would gradually evolve into the perfect roundness of the digital staircase. We opted for a smooth progression: the closer one gets to the real staircase, the more angled the steps become, while further down they eventually align perfectly perpendicular to the respective circle tangent. This created a flowing transition between the physical and the digital staircase.

Vanessa Chu found it particularly challenging to implement the staircase in perspective in a way that felt believable while simultaneously conveying an endless depth. Normally, depth is not perceived very clearly in spiral staircases. However, in order to tell the story that this staircase extends infinitely, we had to work with tilted CG spiral staircases. Vanessa Chu and Jim Obmann therefore searched for a method to display the 3D model at an angle and stretch it in depth without introducing errors in the geometry.

By the time the iterations and feedback from Jürgen and Matthias were incorporated, the basic animation workflow had already been established. The professors’ feedback therefore focused primarily on lighting conditions and the intensity of the animation. Jim developed a workaround using a geometry node system and found a solution that allowed the staircase to be stretched in depth. Physically, this staircase is not correct, but for our visual storytelling this approach worked very well. At this point, physics was deliberately bent a little in order to convey the desired impression of infinite depth.

An Elevator Ride into the Psyche

The elevator was symbolically conceived in the script as a vehicle transporting Clarence through different layers of memory. In winter 2024, Emil previsualised the first elevator scenes, experimenting with lighting and composition to send the elevator into a threatening depth populated by oversized snails.

After Vanessa developed the elevator design through multiple concept drawings, collaboration with production designer Eva Maria Stiebler became essential. While the elevator appeared as a 3D object in full CG shots, it was also built physically in the HFF film studio. Digital concepts and real-world patination informed each other, as Vanessa’s designs guided the construction, which in turn defined the dimensions for Emil’s 3D model.

Sonja Latussek supported the team with detailed textures, giving the elevator a realistic appearance. She also carefully textured small debris objects placed on the elevator roof. Once models were finalised, Emil and Vanessa developed the layout for three full CG shots, stacking snail shells in front of a dark background. Elevator chain swings and dangerous pendulum movements were animated by Vanessa. In consultation with director Matthias Zentner and Professor Jürgen Schopper, Emil built the lighting setup, handled compositing, and fine-tuned lighting digitally.

A central task was the transfer of Vanessa Ramovic’s concept drawings into a precise 3D model. A key aspect of this work was creating a coherent connection between the set construction and the digital elevator. To ensure this, particular attention was paid to a dimensionally accurate approach. In retrospect, Emil Pogolski and Vanessa Ramovic would primarily invest more time in texturing and look development. They would also carry out tests under the actual lighting conditions of the shots at an earlier stage, in order to better align materiality and mood.

To integrate the realistic elevator into the surreal environment, Jim inserted real footage of the actors inside the physical elevator into the digital model opening. Emil added digital dust particles to intensify the ominous abyss and blend live-action and CGI seamlessly.

The Distoring Corridor

Another highlight was the hotel corridor that begins to warp and distort. After Vanessa Chu and Elena Rid created initial concepts, Jim modelled the corridor based on a long basement room at the location, captured via FARO LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry. Since the corridor needed to deform dynamically, Jim tested various geometry node systems to allow distortion at arbitrary points.

Simulating an infinite corridor directly would overwhelm most computers, so Jim devised a trick by scaling the corridor into depth. Viewed through Blender’s camera, the corridor appears endless. He developed a setup allowing control over both roll axis and depth movement. This resulted in a 50-metre corridor segment that, when scaled, created the illusion of infinity. Within this segment, movement allowed the corridor to emerge and disappear into depth.

Each light element within the segment could be controlled individually, enabling transitions from white light to threatening red flames that visually pursued Clarence. It was essential to integrate these light sources with the original plate.

Lighting movement on set had to be transferred to the 3D world and synchronised with the treadmill speed on which the protagonist ran. Once physical conditions were translated into Blender, the composite could function correctly. Jim also handled greenscreen keying and camera tracking, removing the original background and inserting Clarence into the rendered 3D corridor.

The Snail and why it should be feared

The gigantic snail shell threatening to pull Clarence into his dark past was a central element of the film. Elena Rid began sketching snail concepts before the story was fully defined. Inspired by horror films such as I Saw the TV Glow, the snail was designed to feel out of place, like a relic from another world. It represented a mutated version of Clarence’s childhood plush snail, distorted by grief.

At the beginning, a more classic texture was planned for the snail. As the planning progressed, however, the idea emerged to give it a subtle resemblance to a skull. Elena Rid then stretched the 3D model of the snail so that the spiral at its center would recall the hairstyle of Clarence’s mother. During sculpting, the student worked in fine cracks. Elena mainly used the cloth brush to add further small, swirling details and folds to the surface. Small indentations and a pore-covered structure were also incorporated into the sculpt. Elena primarily based this work on the previously created concept art and additional reference photos of old bones.

To achieve the prehistoric, fossil-like look, Elena engaged intensively with the main character. The snail thus served as a symbol for a very old, deeply buried trauma of Clarence. As references, the student mainly used an ammonite fossil from a museum.

Elena later modelled and textured the snail during the VFX phase. It was not intended as a static prop, but as a manifestation of Clarence’s fears and inner conflict, visually referencing the stuffed snail in his hand. Elena sculpted the primary snail in Blender. Additional snails with varied surfaces and shapes were created with Vanessa Chu. Texturing in Substance Painter, supported by lecturer Birgit Hämmerle, resulted in a photorealistic surface with a fossilised yet “moist” quality.

Elena adjusted lighting intensity and temperature, rendered the snail shell, tracked scenes with Ando Avila in 3D Equalizer, and refined them in a complex Nuke setup.

In several iterations, the exact shape of the “eye” was defined: how strongly it should protrude, in which direction the folds should run, and how the desired effect could best be achieved. In addition to a fold that functioned like the snail’s eye, the inner hole of the snail was also intended to resemble a screaming mouth in a face. In this area, Elena Rid and Jim Obmann worked together on the interior of the snail. Jim created a soft mask in Blender that fades toward the edge of the hole. External light sources were not supposed to influence the interior. In the end, it was meant to appear like a black hole that almost sucks Clarence in.

Texturing in Substance Painter was Elena Rid’s first experience with the software, which initially made it a challenge. We wanted to achieve a moldy look, which the student built up using many layers of moss brushes in different whitish and greenish tones on the base texture. Most of the fine grooves in the snail texture were therefore created in Substance Painter, as the details would otherwise have become too small during modeling. The focus was placed more strongly on a bony, fossilized surface.

Since no greenscreen was used, Martin Tallosy assisted with rotoscoping. Colours, contrasts, and brightness were adjusted to integrate the snail seamlessly into live-action footage. Vanessa Chu, Vanessa Ramovic, and Sonja Latussek assisted with camera tracking. Accurate match moves were essential for positioning the digital camera correctly within the large hall.

Learnigns from Set Supervision

After working on animated films in the first year, we eagerly anticipated shooting on a real film set. Preparation involved understanding the responsibilities of VFX supervision on set, ensuring VFX shots were filmed and documented correctly to avoid post-production issues. Asynchronous supervision courses at CAVE Academy helped us learn LiDAR scanning, photogrammetry, and reference photography.

Once preparations and pre-produced props were complete, the four-day shoot began. Supervisory duties rotated among the team, giving everyone insight into all aspects of the role. Tasks included logging VFX shots, recording focal lengths and camera data, capturing shadows using grey balls, and placing tracking points on greenscreens. Colour checkers ensured colour accuracy and white balance. Two shoot days took place at the Munich location for corridors and reception scenes. The remaining days were spent at the HFF film studio for elevator and living room scenes.

Mentor Jan Stolz provided invaluable support as set supervisor. Cinematographer Torsten Lippstock shot the film on an ARRI Alexa 35. Simon Burger introduced us to the role of the Digital Imaging Technician. Mihail Dervenski guided data management and later edited the film, aligning technical expertise with the director’s vision.

Sound Mixing and Grading

Creating a dark atmosphere was essential. Composer Lukas Stipar, previously involved in WOODLAND, delivered a soundtrack that added weight and intensified tension. Dr. Rodolfo Anes Silveira supervised post-production sound, enhancing clarity and authenticity. A Dolby Atmos mix was created at PHAROS Studio 1, where Tschangis Charokh demonstrated object-based audio placement. Andreas Lautil handled colour grading, giving the film a consistent dark-warm palette.

Conclusion

In retrospect, INFINITY HOTEL was an exciting project for us, from which we drew important personal and professional insights.

For Sonja Latussek, it became clear above all that it is important to define clear areas of responsibility at an early stage. In hindsight, she feels she should have paid closer attention from the outset to the fixed tasks that remained under her responsibility and were primarily related to the film’s visual look, such as the textures of the snail or the elevator. An unexpected challenge for her was greenscreen compositing in Nuke, which proved significantly more complex in some scenes than initially anticipated. Camera tracking, on the other hand, went very well. Sonja learned how tracking works in principle, which points in space are suitable for tracking, when they do not work, and at what point a track becomes truly precise. Although she found all areas of on-set production particularly exciting, she would like to focus more strongly on 2D work in the future. She found the 2D animation of COSMIC KNIGHT very pleasant, as it integrated coherently with the CRT television.

Vanessa Chu mainly emphasises the importance of critically questioning technical statements and not blindly relying on hypothetical possibilities. It became apparent that an ISO setting that was too high on the Alexa camera led to heavy image noise, which meant that tracking points in 3D Equalizer had to be painstakingly corrected by hand. She therefore advocates handling technical parameters such as ISO more sensitively in the future. She also emphasizes the importance of collecting as much data as possible on set and communicating early to the production that time must be scheduled between VFX shots to gather data such as references, measurements, and scans.

Emil Pogolski summarizes his conclusion with a simple but fitting guiding principle: “Make it good, kid.” From his perspective, the production of INFINITY HOTEL proceeded overall without major complications. Planned ideas could be implemented, and post-production was structured, even if it took longer than originally planned.

For Elena Rid, it became particularly clear in retrospect how valuable an even longer and freer concept phase would have been. Elena would have liked to work with more concepts and, above all, to experiment more with the snail. Due to time constraints, this was only possible to a limited extent within the project scope. For future work, the student wants to consciously allow more room for experimentation. At the same time, Elena looks back very positively on the rest of the production process. The team made it through the intensive phase well, and in her view, the scheduling in particular proved to be a major strength of the project.

Vanessa Ramovic believes that most aspects of the production worked very well. Towards the end, she and Emil invested a great deal of time in post-production because the elevator compositing iterations required significant effort. She would also like to develop more concepts in the future and test different lighting moods more intensively. Her personal conclusion is less about technology and more about personal attitude: not losing the joy of the work. For her, making films means expressing something and perhaps even putting a smile on someone’s face. This inner light should not be allowed to fade.

Acknowledgements

What was special about our second year of studies at the University of Television and Film Munich was that our entire cohort worked together on a single project. Without question, this was a true team effort in which all six students contributed their existing knowledge to the film while continuing to develop their skills.

Our special thanks go to our professor Jürgen Schopper, who provided us with strong support in VFX supervision. His vision and creative input helped us, during the weekly classes known as “weeklies”, to push the VFX shots to their final form. Prof. Sinje Gebauer, Dr. Rodolfo Anes Silveira, Berter Orpak, Jonas Kluger, Martin Tallosy and Petra Hereth, who together with Professor Schopper form the chair of the VFX degree programme, supported us throughout the entire year with their expertise across various areas of the VFX pipeline.

Together with Prof. Sinje Gebauer, we ensured that all assets and shots were realised and integrated into the overall flow. INFINITY HOTEL introduced us to working with new VFX tools and to closer collaboration with the screenwriting and production departments at the university. Our screenwriters Michael Schwärzler and Jakob Smolinski inspired us early on with precise story ideas, which we were already able to incorporate creatively into our concept drawings in November 2024. Nevertheless, the further development of the material was a collective exchange, in which we, along with our director and professor Matthias Zentner, contributed ideas and gained insight into the authors’ working processes.

Our producers Sonja Hopf and Konstantin Holzner supported us from the very beginning and guided the production with their extensive expertise. While we, as VFX students, largely operated like a small VFX studio during post-production, we were involved in the film from the outset and gained deep insights into various departments, such as production design and casting.

We would also like to thank our actors Till Raskopf, Jonathan Tittel, Nick Woodland, and Sophie Melbinger, as well as the entire film team, for bringing the fictional characters to life and for creating a strong short film together. After the successful completion of the hotel, we were finally able to present the film to a broad audience and guests from the VFX industry at our premiere as part of the VFX Reels 2025 on 27 November 2025 at the HFF. The film premiered at the VFX-Reels 2025 on 27 November 2025 at HFF Munich.

The Producers’ view

WRITTEN BY SONJA HOPF AND KONSTANTIN HOLZNER

As student producers, our task was to realise a live-action narrative film with a high proportion of visual effects, from development through to festival distribution. Working closely with the VFX and screenwriting students, we entered an entirely new production terrain. One of our key learnings was the necessity of considering VFX shots and technical requirements from the very beginning.

We developed a solid understanding of how previs is created and how it functions, as well as what is required on the production side to make a set truly “VFX-ready”. This included scheduling time buffers for tracking markers and scans and actively coordinating between creative departments and the VFX supervisor. It became clear early on that every shot requires detailed, early planning. Learning to realistically assess how many shots can be achieved in a shooting day, and how VFX-heavy shoot days must be calculated and structured, proved to be a particularly valuable challenge.

The project could only succeed as a collective effort. Coming together early in development allowed us to contribute as creative producers and gain a deeper understanding of both the material and the production challenges. Continuous communication across departments was essential, especially as locations changed, the set expanded, and creative ambitions had to be balanced against available resources. Working with professional heads of department set a high bar and challenged us to meet professional standards, a goal we ultimately achieved, resulting in work we are proud of.

The post Infinity Hotel: Endless Rooms, Endless Renders first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by HFF Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München.

The Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München trains filmmakers in directing, cinematography, screenwriting, and production. Its VFX department, led by Prof. Jürgen Schopper, covers digital image creation and visual storytelling.

New mentor for VFX students

The Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (HFF) is seeking a mentor in 3D computer animation to support students in its Visual Effects (VFX) focus area. The position begins on 1 May 2026 and is permanent at 50 percent of regular working hours (20 hours per week). Under the leadership of Professor Jürgen Schopper, the role involves mentoring students through all stages of 3D production, from modelling to rendering. Tasks include project support, workflow planning, and teaching practical skills in 3D computer animation and related software and hardware.

Skills and experience

Applicants should hold a relevant degree, such as in media design, media informatics, or creative technologies, or have equivalent professional experience. The position requires strong communication skills, independent work habits, and fluent German. Experience in higher education environments is preferred, as is interest in machine learning, volumetric capture, and their application in creative-technical contexts. Practical knowledge of Blender and/or Houdini is expected.

Conditions and benefits

The post offers a modern workplace within Munich’s Kunstareal district and access to a creative academic environment. Flexible working hours and partial home office options are available by agreement. Benefits include a staff canteen, good public transport connections, free parking in the underground garage, and the possibility of using the JobBike Bayern programme. The employment is permanent, part-time (50%), and compensated in accordance with pay group 10 of the German public service scale (TV-L). Salary estimates can be checked via the TV-L calculator.

Application and contact

Applications are open until 28 February 2026 via the HFF job portal. Content-related questions can be directed to Prof. Sinje Gebauer (vfx@hff-muc.de), while procedural inquiries should go to Juliane Kretschmer (j.kretschmer@hff-muc.de). HFF Munich explicitly values diversity and inclusion. Applicants with disabilities will be given preference when equally qualified.

As with all new positions and roles, candidates should assess the practical working conditions and institutional support before accepting an offer to ensure a sustainable match between teaching, production and artistic goals.

Original job posting at Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München careers portal
https://karriere.hff-muc.de/jobposting/bd4471285cbe481df72bf38ee7b515ca6215b8650

The post HFF Munich seeks new mentor for 3D animation first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The Lost Bus is a 2025 survival-drama directed by Paul Greengrass for Blumhouse Productions in association with Comet Pictures and Apple Original Films. The film is based on the non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by journalist Lizzie Johnson. Set against the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, it follows a school-bus driver and a teacher who fight to guide 22 children to safety through an encroaching inferno. Combining Greengrass’s documentary-style direction with large-scale visual effects and environmental reconstruction by RISE FX, the film depicts one of the deadliest wildfires in recent history with stark realism.

Supervising the inferno: Oliver Schulz (IMDB | Linkedin) is a senior Visual Effects Supervisor at RISE FX, the Berlin-based VFX studio. Over more than a decade at RISE he has guided VFX supervision on major international productions including Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Blue Beetle and Megalopolis, among many others.

His background spans concept art, digital matte painting and 3D environments; skills that helped him to take the creative lead on blockbuster-scale environment and FX heavy shows. In this interview he reveals how he and his team at RISE tackled the challenge of recreating a burning landscape for The Lost Bus, combining procedural geography, wind-driven vegetation, deep-rendered volumetrics, and machine-learning techniques for depth integration, to bring the inferno to life on screen.

DP: How did you get onto the Lost Bus? 

Oliver Schulz: I came on board after wrapping up on Megalopolis and jumped onto the very first meeting with Charlie Noble and Gavin Round, Production VFX Supervisor and Producer. The project was already awarded at that time so we directly started talking about the Sequences and the scope of the Rise portion of work.

Luckily or better sad tragically this was a real event so in regards of look, there were many references and documentation of this day. So our first meeting was looking through a lot of real world footage from all available sources. Charlie had been prepping reference reels from the very beginning, so we could hone in on a lot of specific ones for each portion of the work because he had references for all of them!

DP: Roughly how big was the RISE team on The Lost Bus, and how long did you spend from first build to final comp?

Oliver Schulz: We started with a very small core team in May 24 and delivered the last shots at the beginning of 25.  I think around 50-60 people worked on the show in total during the production with up- and downramping based on specific project needs like temp deliveries for example.

DP: The antagonist of the movie is the geography of a very particular area, and the fact that it is on fire – how did you make sure that it was recognizably that specific part of the world? 

Oliver Schulz: We started with real world data derived from elevation models. That gave us a pretty good grounding in reality. We got lidar scans for very specific locations like the Pulga Bridges for example which was invaluable as this is usually something one doesn’t get from any publicly available sources. We spent quite a bit of time to get us a very good foundation of all key locations, which meant that everything had a geometrical base until the very last mountain you see on the horizon.

Our Lidar Supervisor David Salamon was instrumental in setting up this base. He used some maps imagery to give a rough base color to all those individual geometries that served as a rough guide later on in layout and surfacing for distributions of materials or assets. One has to keep in mind that most data was post 2018 so for instance vegetation had to be recreated from mostly photographic references shot before the fire. We tried to stay as true as possible to real world geography, but later on of course things had to be changed for storytelling reasons. 

DP: When merging New Mexico plates into your California canyon builds, how did you maintain scale and geological continuity?

Oliver Schulz: As production did not have access or in case of some very sketchy roads didn’t shoot at the original location for safety reasons, they did some scouting through the US and chose some New Mexico locations as stand ins for some of our sequences. The most prominent was the Pulga road for sure. In the film, the first responding firefighters trying to get to the origin of the camp fire first get sight when they are on top of the Pulga Highway bridge crossing the Feather River Canyon.

Without any better option they decide their best shot is to try and get to the fire following a very narrow road on the slope of the canyon. All shots on Pulga Bridge were shot on a Studio Backlot featuring full CG Environments including the FG bridge. This narrow path however was all shot on the New Mexico location with two big fire engines driving a slightly wider road. 

In production that meant that we replaced most of the visible Environment due to a couple of reasons. First of course it needed to have the right roadwidth and the correct canyon in the background. Second we needed to have very windy vegetation everywhere. Third in case all of that worked in camera which was pretty rare we still needed to put FX Elements into every shot consisting of dust, debris, smoke and later also embers. With those guidelines in place probably 90% of the shots became full CG exteriors only keeping small bits of photography for fire engines and some road pieces.

Once all those went into layout we made sure to keep a senseful progression to those shots meaning having the firefighters travel along the road during those shots in cutorder. The topography of the shooting location though was pretty different from the storypoint progression on the pulga road, so was the framing in camera when pointing at the fire from the fire engine interiors.

That of course meant as good and real our base was, it needed to be heavily augmented to make sense with storytelling and framing choices. Most shots feature the correct BG canyon but the midground is totally made up to allow for good view to the fire origin. All of this had to be understandable even with very frenetically moving handheld cameras.

DP: Let’s talk vegetation: How much botanical creative freedom did you have? 

Oliver Schulz: Vegetation was a big part of the environment and one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the fire. All FVX vendors had to tackle it in one way or the other which meant all were contributing to the research for which plant goes where. The foundation was once again the research and material collection from Charlie and his team.

We focused on the most common species found in this region of CA and made sure the level of dryness and the distribution made sense. So in this sense there was not too much freedom here as everyone tried to make this as real as possible from this point of view. For the build we actually just used the most common ground which is Speedtree with some augmentations done in Houdini. Part of the assets were also shares from other vendors which just needed ingestion and rigging in FX.

DP: You mentioned building a hierarchical “ecosystem” in Houdini. How modular was this system, and how much hand-authoring did artists still need to do per shot?

Oliver Schulz: This was something we actually invested a bit of time in at the very beginning and was overseen by CG Supervisor David Schulz and Layout Lead Mareike Loges / Senior Layout Artist Björn Markgraf. The core idea is nothing new and hierarchical just means that you start from the biggest Elements in your kit and than go smaller and smaller based on the previous distribution of Elements. First step is to either scatter or handplace big trees for example, following this you end up with a certain distribution. 

Based on this the system places smaller entities like younger trees or seedlings and smaller shrubs and bushes around or between the big trees. This distribution is based on simple rules like distance or terrain steepness. In case of the Pulga road we divided it up in two categories: mountains and roads. Both had similar procedures. We would always start with the rough blocking geometries matching either scan data, elevation data or sometimes just made up. From there we would generate the base coverage of rock cliffs which would hold out trees mostly in those areas. Following this we created the trees and bigger vegetation which would determine the ground coverage of rocks vs more pepply ground.

Roads were pretty similar but less complex as they mostly feature small stones. Again here we used some manually created maps to drive the distribution of small vs bigger pebbles that mostly accumulate on the side for example.

The toolset itself worked pretty well and as it was applicable as a template we could have a fully laid out shot in a day. Shot specific adjustments were applied on almost every shot though, mostly for continuity, visibility or art direction purpose. 

DP: Vegetation, environment, and FX were all dependent on one another. How did you keep versioning sane between departments?

Oliver Schulz:  That was a big topic indeed and it only is possible with two things: a rigorous approval system and a good pipeline that helps you track those approved layouts. We rely on our usd pipeline to do exactly that for us, it makes it somewhat easy (Im sure layout and production will hit me for this) to track department versioning. For each layout update we`d always get automatic QC renders that run through our inhouse “slapstick” system which is our inhouse auto comp engine.

When Layout would do a specific change it would publish this either on a shot or on an Sequence/Environment level. This will trigger a QC render from the shotcam of the affected shots. Once the rendering is done it will have a postjob that combines it with the prepped plate in nuke and runs another renderjob that will give you the layout reviewable which is than checked and can be approved and pushed into the pipeline from RV. This Layout than becomes available to the FX department which would run all needed simulations and hand off another QC reviewable for approval. Without those systems in place it would have been a nightmare to stay on top of all these versions!

DP: You said the layout department drove wind direction and strength instead of FX. How did that change your creative workflow?

Oliver Schulz: Yes that was indeed true and one of our early conversations we had internally to determine the approach all Environment builds would share. It was a practical decision based on two factors: We would simulate all vegetation on the asset level in different windspeeds for efficiency reasons and we wanted to keep iteration loops to a minimum.

This meant that I wanted to look at layout versions with moving vegetation as the strong directional wind would make it necessary to consider this already while layouting trees. As the direction is clearly visible you cant rely on spinning a tree 360 deg free in Y to create variations as the direction is “baked” in, so you need to see it moving in order to determine if an environment looks good!

The second reason is that FX needed to take care of vegetation simulation only once and when approved never needed to come back. This system worked really well and was accessible to the layout artists down to the single blade of grass, meaning one could really art direct where and how much specific things should move.

DP: You divided smoke into “hero” and “residual” categories. How did you manage density and readability without losing visual clarity?

Oliver Schulz: These two categories were simply based on the fact that we needed to deal with smoke in almost every shot. The ever present residual smoke needed to inherit a direction, needed to be art directable and also needed to render as fast as possible. Its pretty much the equivalent of atmospheric perspective in a wildfire scenario. Our Fx Supervisor Akin Göcmenli came up with a system of instanced presimulated caches that sometimes could consist of thousands of individual ones.

We started by doing simulations of smoke with a constant wind direction and speed that had a hidden source of emission and diffused pretty soon. That gave us a very soft falloff to the edges of the simulation grid which made these simulations perfect to overlap and look as one big single instance of smoke. On top due to those aspects it was quite easy to remove single containers and punch holes into the wall of smoke for visibility. We also invested a bit of time to develop shaders and render efficiencies to cut down on notoriously long volumetric rendertimes for this element.

Hero smoke was the category which either had a visible emission source in frame or simply had a hero storytelling element. These were usually shot or sequence simulations as they were mostly much denser and most of the time also much closer to camera. We also spend a good amount of time matching shading and simulation to real world references.  The secret to readability also lies in relentless QCing of outputs to make sure once you kickoff the expensive lighting renders, you are as certain as possible all elements are going to work. 

DP: The ember work looks incredibly detailed. How did you simulate believable motion in strong winds without visible repetition or looping patterns?

Oliver Schulz: Embers were a big part of the equations so by now you might guess…. Yes we spend a bit of time in asset prep to build some solid foundations. The first thing is of course the driving factor for all fx aspect: the wind.

FX developed hero wind forces that we used to simulate all elements with. A good amount of chaos and variance is key to not run into issues with readable patterns in any simulation. Another factor is collision. Embers will behave a certain way when they collide and thats what we tried to replicate. Also the ground plays a big role especially with the heavier emberclumps that slide over it.

Reality is unbeaten when it comes to little quirks and anomalies especially for something as complex as this. As no one is able to have a ground as detailed as the real world we also sometimes had a collision geometry that had slightly more displacement in order to have more detailed collisions happening. 

DP: Lighting and volumetrics are natural enemies. How did you maintain physically plausible lighting through that much smoke and fire?

Oliver Schulz: That was one of the biggest questions going into this project, considering that what was shot on set sometimes had very little to do with what ended up on screen, especially in terms of atmospherics. The best base for something to look real is to match the real thing. We did so in our asset phase and made sure our shaders and lightrigs were physically plausible, especially the ones only used to develop assets. 

We would match greyballs and reference macbeth charts in order to make sure scene lighting was correct in terms of lightbalancing. Then from there we developed shaders for all aspects.One of the most common issues I see is that volume and surface renders aren’t lookdeved in conjunction. What you end up having to do is to grade surface and volume render differently. This leads to very unrealistic renders very fast because there is no ground truth you can come back to.

We tried to make sure all our shaders worked with each other to have exactly this common base. Also when dealing with dozens of light sources and those issues on top that’s definitely a position you don’t want to be in when time is running…. All volumetrics do have very different properties to them where one of the biggest is how they scatter light. Back to front scattering can take a volume from being ultrabright to consuming all lighting energy and being pitchblack. So once you matched the real thing, use those tools wisely to deviate from there and support the story. 

We tried to always start with a balancing pass usually done still in lighting. This goes to comp as the foundation to do all the finetuning with. Still there was a lot of tuning left for comp and also we needed to break reality more than once to make sure that what you wanted to read in a frame remained readable when tons of smoke and fire went in front. Sometimes we needed to go as far as use the deep data to pull things in and out of the smoke to make them visible. Still the most valuable tool you have is the artist’s eye to determine the sweet spot of good vs real.

DP: You mentioned deep rendering bottlenecks, like OIIO running out of patience with too many AoVs. What exactly went wrong first?

Oliver Schulz: Haha yes that was one of the issues that came when switching to full deep with our renders. That means you have each component of each lightgroup rendered with deep data to put it back together in comp. That resulted in a lot of channels that apparently were too much for OIIO to handle. Thank god that was fixed otherwise I wouldn’t write this story now ;)

DP: Rendering holdouts took up to an hour per frame. Did you develop any automation or optimisation to make deep rendering less painful?

Oliver Schulz: Indeed rendering times for deep holdouts were quite painful and nothing to speed up really. With so many volumetric elements you need to deep hold out everything with everything to make sure its accurate. If you multiply this with the number of separate elements rendered and with the amount of light Aovs times the amount of components you end up with a staggering number of renders.

Plus in the end you need to denoise all frames so the best solution was try to plan out delivery dates as good as possible to have time for all those thousands prerenders to run on the farm. Still our compositing Supervisor Oliver Hohn and Lead Nicolas Burgers had some longer evenings ensuring all renders were there the next morning to be picked up by the compositing Artists.

DP: You used machine-learning depth generators to create deep data from plates. What tools powered that, and how reliable were the results?

Oliver Schulz: We started testing tools quite early in anticipation of very challenging compositing work. DepthAnything v2 was what we ended up using as a default prerender pass. The results were a mixed bag considering the wide range of plates we worked with, although it proved to be valuable to have. Comp remapped the relative value output of the depth passes to absolute values from deep data with help of lidarscans or renders and was able to create some good integration especially with more wispy type of smoke.

For denser smoke and more accurate holdouts especially for actors we still needed to rely on a lot of manual roto for good integration. The AI passes proved to be pretty successful though for fast temp work as you get something going in no time. Issues were mostly the missing good temporal stability and also the lack of precision. 

 DP: Before deploying new tech like ML depth generators or procedural ecosystems, how do you test them safely inside production?

Oliver Schulz: We implemented those during production directly on our project infrastructure, so developed, tested and used simultaneously. 

DP: Were there any spectacular ML depth map failures, like smoke reading as solid or background cliffs collapsing?

Oliver Schulz: Depth popping or lost shapes were the most common ones. But as none of these passes were used without correction in comp I’m sure I haven’t seen all of them!

DP: With so many volumetric layers, how did compositors manage complexity without drowning in passes?

Oliver Schulz: We have standard workflows for loading CG renders into nuke which do provide a basic level of organization. However the more elements you have the bigger the compscripts and we had some good ones for sure!

DP: Fire colouration is tricky. Did you use any spectral rendering or rely purely on LUTs to match on-set lighting and heat distortion?

Oliver Schulz: That is very true.. Luckily production tried to shoot everything with a practical fire which provided a good level of references in camera. If you than try to render as physically plausible as possible and have something in frame that you can match exposure to you are already halfway there. We didn’t use any spectral rendering here and rendered everything through Houdinis Karma in RGB.

DP: You switched to full motion-blur sampling for embers instead of faked streaks. How much did that impact render time, and was it worth it?

Oliver Schulz: Oh that was worth every minute of rendertime.. Real Motionblur for an element which is mainly visible in motionblur is a good investment. Plus the rendertimes weren’t actually that bad and took only a couple of minutes as you are not dealing with an expensive shading as well. The biggest benefit is getting nice curved and very interesting blurs especially with collisions.  The trick actually is to only invest time where its needed and render other elements with less costly settings. Deep compositing allows for it as you are not bound to any holdouts and you can combine differently rendered motion blur without any problems.

DP: How crucial was RiseFlow for distributing simulations and maintaining consistency across all sequences?

Oliver Schulz: We started implementing RiseFlow at the very beginning once we had our initial workflow for distributing elements figured out. The development was done by our Head of Pipeline Paul Schweizer and the implementation on the show was spearheaded by Jonas Sorgenfrei.

It actually is a very versatile framework that we use for a variety of tasks here at Rise. Its a modular node based System that can take arbitrary inputs and execute them in a chained workflow. FX built templates for various scenarios that got exposed variables like wind direction, speed, inputs for collision geometry etc. These could than be varied per shot and sent to the farm for execution. Once all those Sims were done, QC renders were submitted to the Farm and when completed, auto comped in Slapstick.

That meant that one artist could do changes on a big number of shots by adjusting the template and than resimming and rendering them over night. All render elements were deepcomped with our deep plate workflow and reviewed the next morning. This allowed for rapid adjustments and turnarounds which was a very crucial aspect of this fast paced production. 

DP: How did RiseFlow and Slapstick communicate between departments for reviews and dailies?

Oliver Schulz: RiseFlow and Slapstick are two different things really. The point where they communicate is that Riseflow might trigger a farmjob where Slapstick is hooked in as a post process that gets triggered after completion of the render. Slapstick again is a modular node based system implemented in Nuke that allows for a generalized template to be created. These inputs could take for instance all general elements that comp might use to layer a shot like mainplates, rotos, colorcorrections, lensdistortions etc and comp them together. We use Slapstick in all departments to create automatic reviewables for assetbuild like turntables with reference images, lighting slaps,fx slaps and so on.

DP: You’ve called The Lost Bus the toughest matchmove job you’ve ever seen. How did you solve the handheld, wet, low-light camera challenge?

Oliver Schulz: That was a tough one indeed. To solve this it really just comes down to the excellence of all individual artists that created those matchmoves. So there is no magic recipe to get through so many challenging matchmoves…

DP: Greengrass loves long, continuous takes. How did you manage to iterate and render efficiently on such heavy, unbroken shots?

Oliver Schulz: I guess it is really to choose your battles wisely… Invest into a good foundation early on and make sure to be as precise as possible in prep phase. Once the show is running and you are in full delivery mode there is no time to go back and redevelop anything.

Render optimization as much as possible and then relying on everything that was set up in the beginning is key to not have to think about accuracy anymore when you are trying to finish the shots. We did this and it really paid off, though having a couple of long shots with lots of elements to render we never ran into the issue of having to fear a render didn’t get finished in time.

There were some challenging shots for all departments involved but again the prep phase paid off and we managed to deliver everything in time. It’s really a Situation in which the Production team led by Michelle Cullen and Production Manager Androniki Nikolaou outdid themselves by planning and scheduling every milestone in production to make sure we had what we needed to finish shots in time. Of course that also means adjusting and revising this schedule each and every day based on client comments and changes.. It’s a tough job to make sure the whole production runs like a well oiled machine!

DP: Deep compositing only works if all layers align perfectly in space. Did you use diagnostic tools or pure visual QC to verify deep accuracy?

Oliver Schulz: The good thing about deep is that it’s pretty accurate as long as the sampling increments in depth are small enough for certain elements. It’s a game of keeping error thresholds low enough so you don’t pick them up actually. The balancing is precision versus filesize. Surface renders aren’t an issue really as you are dealing with front and backsides of hard surface objects really.

The fun starts with volumetric elements and this is where you need to tweak the settings a bit to make sure you don’t end up having 5GB per frame in volumetric renders. Still frames could grow to well over 1GB on bigger shots with all elements included, so we needed to do some rough calculations beforehand to make sure we weren’t running out of allocated serverspace.

DP: How did you maintain consistency for fire behaviour across sequences? Was there a single reference look, or did it evolve shot by shot?

Oliver Schulz: One of the big topics obviously here as the quality of the fire not only needed to remain consistent but also serve the story in how it behaves. When you look at fires in reality they all have very different qualities to them depending on a ton of external factors like what is burning, where it burns, what is the actual heat it produces and what is the influence of the wind and so on. So yes it’s crucial to pick a reference and not try to incorporate them all. The initial tactic we used was to create asset based fires with all components.

The two types that production defined as assets were “spotfires” and “forestfires”. Pretty generalized in description though mostly divided up by scale. So we took those two types into asset development and created a little scene with them. Forestfire in the background and spotfires in the foreground. This scene actually was the same one we used to lookdev all assets in. So we had a common ground for all assets really and the fx ones were not different.

We picked a general reference we felt was working well for each category and supplemented that with references that production had shot on set. The shot element though were mostly run by gas so wouldnt really emit any smoke but were a general ref in terms of breakup and edge qualities. Also those would come in native resolution where most of the actual refs are cellphone captures of much poorer quality.

So with all those references in place we started matching the fires again in different windspeeds. We tried to also implement all little details especially on the bigger forest fire like flambursts on dry wood, falling burning pieces of wood etc. Once fire was in place we hooked it up with all secondary elements like smoke and embers. We had already pretty robust setups developed for each of them individually so we could already build on a solid foundation using those as a base.

Once this little scene was successfully approved by production to go into shots we splitted out the individual components as assets again. These had all elements attached like smoke emission, ember emission, lots of different masks for heat distortion and were ready to be dropped into shots.

Using this technique we had a very solid foundation of very similar looking and behaving fires. Of course for hero shots we would need to resim those, but with setups in place and our template system it was mostly straightforward. Of course there are shots that need to tell a certain story like a fire coming right at you towards camera. Solving a problem like reading a perspective of a selfilluminating matter coming right towards camera is a different beast though you can’t prep for! This just takes a lot of creativity and trial and error to get right…

DP: What’s the single biggest creative takeaway from The Lost Bus you’d carry into your next show?

Oliver Schulz:  Don’t try to put out all the fires at once….

DP: Which shot makes you proudest or gives you flashbacks?

Oliver Schulz: Oh there are so many good ones really, honestly when I was watching all shots in a row I was so happy about the overall level of quality the team achieved in every aspect. So hard to pick singles but the Embercam full CG shots looked amazing on the big screen and were pretty spectacular… but getting them to the state we delivered them in was quite a journey…

DP: Finally, if you had to redo The Lost Bus from scratch, what would you rebuild first? Vegetation tools, compositing templates, or your caffeine reserves?

Oliver Schulz: Myself :)

The post Rendering the Inferno at RiseFX: The Lost Bus first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Foundry has opened public testing for the Nuke 17 Open Beta, the latest step in the long-running effort to modernise its compositing platform. The company highlights a reworked 3D system, an overhauled annotation interface, and a new Variable framework intended to strengthen data exchange across pipelines.

This release continues Foundry’s shift toward USD-based workflows, a direction the company has been exploring since Nuke 14. On paper, the new 3D system allows compositors to access the same assets and scene data used by other departments, aligning Nuke with 3D and animation tools in a shared pipeline.

The 3D rebuild: a long road

The official documentation (As far as it is currently available) lists updated projection and masking workflows, lighting controls, and new node structures within the 3D environment. There is also mention of a revised ScanlineRender v2, plus geo stacking and path masking. Foundry positions these as steps toward tighter scene organisation and smoother data exchange.

However, as Topic Rooms VFX notes in its opinion of the beta, many artists are questioning who this new system is really for. Most compositors still use Nuke’s 3D tools for projection, relighting, and camera mapping rather than full scene rendering. The publication points out that a USD-driven workflow may benefit pipeline engineers more than everyday artists.

What artists say they actually want from Nuke 17

According to the same commentary, artists would rather see practical improvements such as faster projection nodes, volumetric light tools, or even a lightweight preview renderer similar to Eevee. The argument is that Foundry continues to refine its 3D infrastructure while ignoring smaller quality-of-life updates that could immediately improve daily compositing work.

Annotations and variables

Beyond the 3D rebuild, Nuke 17 introduces a completely redesigned annotation workflow. The new Annotations Panel and Toolbar are meant to simplify feedback cycles, reducing the confusion that often arises in collaborative review sessions. The documentation describes this as a “whole new experience” for timeline annotation, suggesting a clearer, faster way to handle shot notes and client feedback.

The Variable system is another quiet but potentially important addition. It provides a framework for sharing and managing template data across nodes and scripts, effectively improving communication between compositors, pipeline engineers, and automation tools. If it works as intended, this could make complex setups more maintainable.

Still early days for Nuke 17

It’s worth emphasising that this is an early beta. Foundry has made it clear that the listed features are subject to change before the final release, and more updates are promised. The company provides a free sample script and assets to help testers explore the new 3D environment, along with detailed documentation on the updated node behaviour.

For now, users are invited to test, experiment, and submit feedback — but not to expect production-ready stability. As with any beta, it’s advisable to evaluate Nuke 17 in a controlled environment before integrating it into a live pipeline.

The Nuke 17 Open Beta is available for download from Foundry’s official site.

The post Foundry Opens Nuke 17 Beta: New 3D System, New Variables first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

After eight months of silence, The Mill has been revived. The VFX and post-production icon, once shuttered under Technicolor in February 2025, re-emerges under new ownership: global translation and transcreation heavyweight TransPerfect. TransPerfect acquired The Mill in April 2025, with a stated goal to preserve the studio’s creative heritage while expanding its global reach. The company, active in 140 markets, describes the move as a “commitment to creative excellence”, combining The Mill’s artistry with its own infrastructure and AI-driven localisation technology.

Familiar Faces, New Era

Continuity appears central to the relaunch. In London, creative directors Ross Urien and Ben Blundell (returning from No. 8) are joined by Matthew-Ben Campbell as head of design and Liam Collinwood as VP managing director. The Paris studio also brings back familiar names: Fabien Godeneche as managing director, Benoit Holl leading creative operations, Guillaume Ho as VFX supervisor and creative director, Guillaume Parra as head of CG, Damien Canameras as head of 2D, and Vincent Venchiarutti as head of design.

In Paris, the leadership speaks of both legacy and evolution. Guillaume Ho calls it “breathing new life” into The Mill’s tradition of pushing creative and technical limits, while Guillaume Parra emphasises a “commitment to embracing emerging technologies” to exceed client expectations. Across statements, the tone is clear: the revival is not nostalgic, but operational. Teams are already active in London, Paris, Seoul, and Bangalore, with expansion into the US market under consideration.

From Gladiator to GlobalLink

Founded in 1990, The Mill became synonymous with cinematic craftsmanship, from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) to pioneering work in real-time and immersive media. The closure of its Technicolor parent earlier this year marked what many in the industry feared was an end to that legacy. Now, with TransPerfect’s backing, The Mill positions itself as a creative brand with “independent spirit and global reach”. The company claims that its new infrastructure will enable faster, scalable production across languages and markets.

Conclusion: Revival with Caveats

The return of The Mill is undeniably good news for the VFX and post community. The brand’s craft-driven ethos and long-standing team continuity offer stability in an industry still recovering from multiple studio closures. However, the success of this new chapter will depend on how well TransPerfect’s corporate infrastructure coexists with The Mill’s culture of artistry. For now, the team’s optimism and The Mill’s survival are reasons to celebrate.

The post The Mill Returns first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Foundry has released Flix 8.0, the latest version of its collaborative story-development platform originally built at Sony Pictures Imageworks. The headline feature: a dedicated Storyboard Pro Extension that allows artists to send individual panels back and forth between Flix and Toon Boom’s Storyboard Pro. Each panel retains version history and can be replaced in-place, eliminating the previous export/import tedium.

Flix continues to act as a centralised repository for storyboard panels—scanned, drawn in Photoshop, or created in Storyboard Pro—complete with automatic scaling, versioning, and export to editorial tools such as Media Composer and Premiere Pro.

New shots UI and workflow changes

Flix 8.0 debuts a redesigned Shots UI, giving artists direct control over shot creation, naming conventions, and metadata. The interface simplifies round-tripping with editorial and storyboard tools, making shot grouping and sequencing more explicit. A Sequence Ingest UI now provides real-time feedback during file imports, visualising progress and logging status in detail—a small but overdue transparency feature. Flix’s drag-and-drop behaviour has also been rewritten: panels can now be dropped into any browser location without pre-selection, or directly onto an existing panel to version it up.

Plugin support and extensibility

The new Client Plugin framework exposes UI customisation via the Chrome plugin system, allowing studios to insert custom buttons or workflow actions. It’s a modest first step toward production-specific tool integration, though implementation requires in-house JavaScript knowledge.

System and pipeline specifics

According to the official release notes, Flix 8.0’s architecture remains split between Flix Server and Flix Client. Flix Server runs exclusively on Intel 64-bit processors under Rocky Linux 9. Foundry explicitly warns that AMD processors “may lead to unexpected runtime errors”. The temporary directory must have at least twice the free space of the largest imported AAF file. Recommended configuration: eight cores or more, 16 GB RAM minimum, clock speed above 3.2 GHz. Flix Client runs on Windows 11 and macOS 15.0 (Apple Silicon supported). Linux desktops remain officially unsupported. Minimum configuration: quad-core CPU @ 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM, SSE 4.2 instruction support. Round-trip and import/export are certified for Adobe Photoshop CC 2024/2025, Avid Media Composer 2023/2024, Adobe Premiere Pro 2024/2025 (though version 2025.4+ is not yet verified), and Storyboard Pro 2024/2025. The notes recommend Storyboard Pro 25.0.1 specifically, as 25.0.0 can break imports.

Known limitations

The release notes flag multiple caveats: contact-sheet templates can fail during export; panels may display incorrectly until manually refreshed; and auto-update from pre-6.5.0 macOS builds fails on Apple Silicon, requiring manual reinstall. These are not unusual for Flix, but teams should validate behaviour before rollout.

“Price” and availability

Flix 8.0 is available now as a subscription-only product, priced “on request”. With current industry budgets, “available on request” usually translates to “too expensive”, and Foundry offers no public tiered pricing.

Why it matters

Flix remains one of the few purpose-built hubs linking story, editorial, and layout in large-scale animation or VFX workflows. Version 8.0’s Storyboard Pro integration closes a long-standing loop for 2D pre-production teams, while the updated UIs and plugin framework improve day-to-day usability.

Still, the technical limitations, Intel-only servers, Linux exclusivity, and selective software support, make this release better suited for enterprise pipelines than independent shops. Studios should test the update in a controlled environment before deployment, particularly if their infrastructure runs on AMD hardware or uses Storyboard Pro 25.0.0.

The post Flix 8.0: Foundry’s story hub gets serious about Storyboard Pro first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Netflix has consolidated its visual effects and virtual production divisions, merging Scanline VFX and Eyeline Studios into a single brand, Eyeline. The company confirmed that all existing studio locations will remain operational. According to Netflix, the move unites Scanline’s long-standing expertise in cinematic visual effects with Eyeline’s advances in virtual production and volumetric capture. The reorganisation aims to bring both teams under one creative and technical framework.

Scanline’s Legacy in Simulation and Cinematic VFX

Founded 36 years ago, Scanline VFX built a reputation for large-scale simulation work and complex VFX integration. The company received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for its proprietary fluid simulation software, Flowline, which has become a production mainstay for photorealistic water and particle effects. Scanline’s recent credits include Stranger Things, Wednesday, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10. The studio also earned a 2025 Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for its work on Andor Season 2.

Eyeline Studios: Virtual Production Meets Research

Launched in 2019, Eyeline Studios focuses on virtual production, volumetric capture, and lighting simulation. Its proprietary Light Dome system replicates real-world lighting with measurable precision, offering filmmakers consistent and reproducible conditions across digital and live-action environments. Eyeline received the Visual Effects Society’s Groundbreaking Technology Award for its volumetric capture stage. The setup was recently used in Wednesday Season 2 to create Christopher Lloyd’s Professor Orloff and has also supported production on Happy Gilmore 2 and the upcoming A House of Dynamite.

Generative AI Enters the Pipeline

Eyeline has also been applying generative AI tools to assist in production workflows, particularly in The Eternaut (El Eternauta), Netflix’s Argentine sci-fi adaptation. Netflix describes these AI-driven tools as supporting creative collaboration and efficiency, though specific implementations have not been detailed publicly. The company has not disclosed which AI systems or models are in use.

Unified Brand, Global Ambition

With both divisions now operating under the Eyeline name, Netflix says the merged entity will combine “nearly four decades of VFX artistry” with “cutting-edge virtual production and AI-enabled tools.” The company’s stated goal is to “pioneer new technologies that enhance creative collaboration and streamline workflows for filmmakers worldwide.” Current and upcoming projects involving Eyeline include Stranger Things Season 5, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, The Witcher Seasons 4 and 5, One Piece Season 2, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, Spider-Man Noir, and Daredevil: Born Again Season 2.

Testing the Promise

While Netflix presents Eyeline as a future-facing production hub, the operational impact for external vendors and production partners remains unclear. Details on how Eyeline will collaborate with outside VFX houses or integrate third-party workflows have not yet been released.

The post Netflix Merges Scanline and Eyeline first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Blender’s compositor is powerful, but not everyone enjoys assembling the same stack of glare, colour correction, and noise nodes from scratch. The new free setup Easy Photorealism by developer Selman aims to fix that. The node group collects the most common post effects into one coherent layout that behaves more like Photoshop’s layer-based system.

According to the official description, the group includes glare, chromatic aberration, sharpening, film-style noise, vignetting, and basic colour adjustments. Instead of building each node manually, users append the provided .blend file, select the node tree called “Easy Photorealism 2.0,” and switch to the Compositing workspace. The package currently targets Blender 4.5. The developer states that an update for Blender 5.0 is planned but not yet released.

Designed for Familiarity

The Reddit thread announcing the tool describes it as “an all-in-one compositing node group that makes it as easy as possible to post-process renders that are meant to look photorealistic.” Artists describe the setup as particularly useful for quick look development or for users more familiar with Photoshop than Blender’s node editor. One comment summarises the appeal: “I always end up rebuilding the same few post nodes. Having them packaged together just saves time.”

The design philosophy is straightforward. Rather than introducing new filters, Easy Photorealism wraps existing compositor functions in an ordered, pre-tuned layout. Each effect can be toggled, adjusted, or bypassed individually. For non-technical artists, this offers a shortcut to consistent finishing without opening half a dozen sub-node groups.

Between Template and Tool

Despite its convenience, Easy Photorealism is not a black-box plug-in. It still relies on Blender’s standard compositor and uses native nodes exclusively. Experienced users can open the group to inspect or modify its internals, or merge it into existing production node trees. The setup provides a starting point, not a finalised pipeline. In production environments, technical artists can extract the useful parts such as chromatic aberration or bloom and integrate them into their own node networks.

Known Limitations

Easy Photorealism is currently tuned for Blender 4.5. Compatibility with Blender 5.0 is planned but not yet confirmed. As with any node group, version updates could alter internal socket names or data types. Users should verify node connections after Blender updates before production use.

Another recurring comment in community threads concerns grouped render passes. When wrapping compositor nodes into a group, additional passes such as Z-depth or normal channels may need to be re-exposed manually. Users who depend on multipass workflows should check their input and output routing before final renders.

Performance testing also remains essential. Each enabled effect (chromatic aberration in particular) adds computational load. For iterative preview rendering, that can become noticeable.

The Broader Context

This isn’t the first attempt to bring 2D-style editing into Blender. Other projects, such as the Paint System add-on, aim to reproduce Photoshop-like layers directly on 3D objects. Easy Photorealism differs by focusing on compositing rather than texture painting, essentially handling the post-render stage instead of the material or surface level.

Together, these experiments show a trend: artists expect 3D tools to match the directness of 2D software, especially for finishing and colour work. While Blender’s compositor remains node-driven by design, curated templates like this lower the barrier for those who prefer adjustment sliders to wiring diagrams.

Practical Takeaway

Easy Photorealism offers a clean, free entry point into post-processing within Blender. It can serve as a learning example, a time-saving preset, or a compositing base for smaller productions. Its greatest strength lies in standardising a repetitive workflow like setting up bloom, vignetting, and subtle noise, so that artists can focus on look rather than wiring.

However, as with all community tools, test it in your own conditions before trusting it in production. Check render performance, compatibility with your Blender version, and whether its default settings match your desired output.

The post Blender’s Compositor Gets a Photoshop-Style Setup (Free) first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The IBC announcement

At IBC 2025, Adobe confirmed that Premiere Pro 25.5 integrates the full Film Impact transition and effect library directly into the application. The company is emphasising this as both a creative expansion and a practical elimination of a common subscription burden. Until this release, Film Impact was a standalone plug-in collection costing €15–30 per month. With version 25.5, the entire catalogue is bundled into Creative Cloud at no additional cost. Adobe is making this available to all Premiere Pro users beginning 12 September 2025.

Film Impact’s evolution from plug-in to built-in

Film Impact is a developer with a reputation for stable, GPU-accelerated transitions and effects widely used in professional editing. Adobe’s acquisition, reported earlier in 2025, was not simply a brand buyout but an absorption of a mature, commercially proven toolset. This toolset now appears in Premiere Pro without any separate installation or licensing. The effects are accessed in the Effects panel, or through the dedicated Film Impact Dashboard under the Window > Extensions menu, where editors can browse live previews of each transition.

The catalogue is wide. It contains polished versions of dissolves, blurs, and wipes—updated variants of editing staples that now render more smoothly and play in real time. It also includes more aggressive stylisation tools. Earthquake, glitch, distortion, chaos, and VHS-damage are among the more destructive transition types now standardised inside Premiere. For editors seeking more abstract visuals, the library also contains kaleidoscopic transformations and 3D transitions that add spatial depth between cuts.

Crucially, all of these tools are GPU-accelerated. In practical terms, this means an end to the familiar red render bar above transitions that once required preview rendering before playback. According to Adobe, the effects remain real-time even under heavy parameter customisation. This GPU dependence is a direct continuation of Film Impact’s engineering focus before the acquisition, where the company consistently positioned its transitions as faster to preview than comparable third-party solutions.

One unique feature of Film Impact that Adobe has retained is the “Surprise Me” button. Instead of default settings, this function instantly generates randomised variations of an effect, allowing editors to preview unconventional results and select creative alternatives without manually keyframing or duplicating effect instances.

Expanding motion capabilities inside Premiere

Adobe’s strategy is clearly to offload simpler motion design work into Premiere Pro, reducing the need for round-tripping through After Effects for straightforward graphics animation. Several of the new Film Impact tools are aimed at titles and logos. Editors can now transform static text into 3D animated lettering with shadow casting and depth within seconds. Logos can be duplicated and animated using pre-built behaviours, creating the illusion of bespoke motion graphics without building compositions. Titles can be animated using light sweeps, glow effects, wiggling distortions, bounces, and pops. While these animations remain parameter-driven and customisable, they are designed to produce acceptable results directly from their default states, speeding up editorial workflows.

Beyond motion graphics, Film Impact effects now serve grading and look-development purposes. Editors can apply glows, halation, and lens echoes, or simulate atmospheric lighting through volumetric rays. Bokeh effects generate photorealistic out-of-focus textures. Red, green, and blue channels can be shifted independently to correct fluorescent light imbalances. Chromatic aberration is available for stylistic distortion. Blend modes can be applied directly within the effect framework. Vignette tools no longer rely on simple oval shapes, but allow arbitrary warping to match composition geometry. A camera shake simulator is also included, able to add handheld movement to static tripod shots. Collectively, these tools extend Premiere Pro’s built-in grading capabilities beyond simple Lumetri adjustments.

Timeline and playback refinements

Parallel to the new effects, Adobe has targeted workflow bottlenecks in the timeline. For years, dragging a clip within Premiere’s sequence produced only an empty rectangle, requiring editors to guess sync relationships with underlying audio. In version 25.5, audio waveforms remain visible even during clip movement or when performing ripple, roll, and rate-stretch edits. This change is accompanied by markers and keyframes staying visible as well, preventing alignment errors during complex edits.

Another update addresses fading. Editors can now apply and adjust multiple fade or crossfade transitions across clips simultaneously. Combined with last year’s visual fade handles, this reduces repetitive clicking and improves batch adjustments.

Adobe has set a clear benchmark for playback responsiveness: reducing the delay between pressing play and seeing frames to under 0.1 seconds. The company states that significant progress has already been made toward this target, and that further optimisations will follow. This represents a technical focus on perceived latency—an issue that has consistently affected longform editing in earlier Premiere releases.

Codec support and GPU acceleration

Premiere Pro 25.5 introduces new codec handling and GPU acceleration. Hardware decoding of 10-bit 4:2:2 H.264 and HEVC media is now available on NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell GPUs, enabling real-time playback of formats traditionally known for high quality and low file size but difficult decoding. Canon Cinema RAW Light now benefits from hardware acceleration, providing smoother playback and up to tenfold faster exports. ARRI workflows also see support for ARRIRAW HDE (High Density Encoding). In this mode, footage is encoded at 60 percent of its original file size while retaining image data. Premiere Pro can now natively play back this optimised ARRIRAW format without relying on third-party plug-ins.

Small but necessary workflow fixes

Alongside headline features, Adobe has implemented several incremental corrections. Editors can now set a default font for captions and text, eliminating the need to manually override the long-standing default of Minion Pro. Keyboard shortcuts have been extended, making it possible to toggle track mute and solo based on track targeting without mouse interaction. A persistent bug has also been corrected in the Effect Controls panel, where adding a keyframe at the last frame of a clip previously jumped to the beginning of the following clip.

For high-end colour workflows, 16-bit PNG import is now supported, and metadata handling has been improved across PNG, DNxHR, and DNxHD formats, reducing errors when exchanging files with other finishing environments. To improve organisation, new Sequence Colour Tabs allow editors to colour-code timelines, adding a layer of visual reference to complex sequences.

After Effects 25.5

The companion release of After Effects 25.5 includes fewer features, but they target daily efficiency for motion designers. The standout is Quick Offset, a tool that allows multiple keyframes or entire layers to be shifted in time with one click-and-drag action. This eliminates the need to manually adjust dozens of layers individually in large compositions. In addition, zooming and navigation inside the composition viewer has been re-engineered for smoother response, particularly when magnifying to pixel level for detailed work. Cache handling has been refined, improving preview and playback responsiveness.

Availability and scope

Premiere Pro 25.5 and After Effects 25.5 will roll out beginning 12 September 2025, timed with IBC in Amsterdam. The Film Impact integration is included in the main install of Premiere Pro and requires no separate download.

Adobe has not published a comprehensive mapping of Film Impact’s original plug-ins against their new built-in equivalents. It remains unclear whether the entire legacy library has been preserved or whether some plug-ins were excluded. Until further documentation is available, users are advised to compare older Film Impact installations with the new built-in set before migrating active projects.

At IBC, Adobe also showcased new enterprise-level updates for Frame.io, including metadata handling on account level, low-code connectors for workflow integration, and additional sharing and security options. These developments affect collaborative workflows but fall outside the scope of Premiere Pro and will be covered separately.

As with any new release, these features should be tested thoroughly before deployment in production environments. Stability, render consistency, and interoperability with shared project files remain critical factors for professional pipelines.

The post Premiere Pro gains 90+ Film Impact effects – plug-in now built-in first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Milk VFX’s work on Heads of State opens with a high‑octane “La Tomatina” sequence dominated by CG mayhem. VFX Supervisor David Sadler‑Coppard – IMDb | LinkedIn led his team through a shoot‑interruption due to strikes, transforming a modest placeholder‑tomato setup into an extensive, fully digital fruit fight.

DP: So, I heard there was a Food Fight at Milk VFX … 

David Sadler-Coppard: I was assigned as VFX Supervisor for Heads of State at Milk when we were first awarded the show. Initially, we were bidding on several sequences, with the La Tomatina Festival scene being relatively modest in scope. The festival is a real thing, by the way. However, after the production went on hiatus for about a year due to the strikes, we reviewed the first assemblies and quickly realised the sequence needed far more work.

We were basically briefed to replace all of the tomato ‘matts’ practical placeholder red matts used on set which didn’t really hold up in camera with CG tomatoes, tomato pulp and tomato liquid, also to add additional flying tomatoes and tomato splats and additional texture to walls/buildings as needed. While there was other work in the Tomatina sequence, the tomatoes were the star, and they had to be convincing without distracting from the action, especially since this was the film’s opening scene.

What began as a seemingly simple brief grew into a complex undertaking as post progressed, from intricate simulations and crowd integration to the careful management of ongoing feedback. We had a schedule from around July to November, which ended up extending into January. At peak I think we were around 30 artists.

DP: The Tomatina sequence is a tomato lover’s nightmare and a VFX artist’s dream (or possibly the other way around). What were your first thoughts when you saw the plates?

David Sadler-Coppard: It became clear very quickly that La Tomatina needed a lot of help from VFX. Almost every shot had either a few red matts on the ground or nothing at all and thus required tomatoes. There was also lots of stunt, rig and wire work that needed to be brought together and integrated well. For me seeing some of the wide shots with hundreds of people running around on an empty plaza and being briefed to add tomatoes underneath them.. That was quite a challenge.

DP: What were the plates from the set like? Was it at least wet and glistening, or did they just throw around some red fabric?

David Sadler-Coppard: The production was very organised and Milk was provided with plenty of shoot information such as clean plates, HDRIS, Lidar and 3D assets if applicable and anything we needed really to get things going. 

Some shots featured placeholder tomato matts on the ground, though these often caused more problems than they solved, as they tended to “slide” and interfere with shadows or contact points with the crowd. Other shots had nothing at all, while certain close-ups included a scattering of real tomatoes. In the end, we often replaced even the practical ones, as it was ultimately easier and gave us more control over consistency and integration.

A lot of the stunts and setpieces were filmed or partially filmed practically like the explosions and Milk usually just ‘enhanced’ or extended and further integrated these set pieces together. Originally the crowd work was larger in scope and we had bid to do more 3d crowd extension work but in the end we only ended up using them in a few shots, it’s just how the edit came out. They were only meant to be used to fill out the background.

DP: So, roto must have been a nightmare?

David Sadler-Coppard: Roto and paint was certainly a challenge but managed brilliantly by Ben Thomas (HOD Roto/prep –find him on LinkedIn | IMDB ). As well as all the actors and props, we also had to roto all the shadows on the ground, which we couldn’t key properly in some cases (sometimes due to the matts), to ensure seamless CG integration.

DP: Since no tomatoes were harmed in the making of this scene, you had to create them digitally. What were the big technical hurdles in making thousands of CGI tomatoes fly, splat, and interact with actors and the environment?

David Sadler-Coppard: As we had a fixed region with the Plaza we opted to create a large environment pass scattering all the pre-made CG tomato chunks, liquid and pulp everywhere. This was masterminded by the very talented Charles- Henri Vidaud, our Head of Environments (Find hiim on IMDb | LinkedIn).

It took many rounds of feedback and notes to get the overall ‘layout’ approved, essentially the coverage and boundary of the whole tomato area. Luckily shoot continuity was quite good so once all the cameras were conformed the layout was more or less in place quite quickly, although some shots had additional custom tomatoes added.  For the final section where Priyanka slides through the tomatoes on her back, we created a custom hero section with extra detail to hold up close to camera.

We also created additional texture passes across the plaza, tyre tracks, footprints, extra stains, and even a depth pass isolating the plaza’s pebble mortar, to capture the effect of tomato juice seeping into every crack and crevice. These IDs were rendered alongside the other CG passes, giving comp a safety net in case the CG alone didn’t fully achieve the desired look.

With regard to the simulations it was quite time consuming. Obviously we could not matchmove every single foot in every shot so we had to pick the ‘best’ ones that we felt would help sell interactions the best. The tomato layout area was then isolated around those feet and passed to FX where just that patch was simulated and then pass back and merged with the lighting scene. 

For hero simulations like people sliding around in the tomatoes we did full body tracking not just for the sim but also for shadow casting back onto the tomatoes. Getting that interaction working  really helped sell the CG for me and our HOD Andres Tollar oversaw all that team and their work.

The flying tomatoes consisted of simulated chunks and liquid that was randomly emitting across the whole plaza and could be enabled or disabled depending on the notes as the directive was usually to just add into the background of shot for extra chaos as needed. The shot specifically where Priyanka slides and comes to a stop in the tomato goo took about 40 versions to get just the right consistency and behaviour approved.

DP: And why were no real tomatoes used in that scene? They could have collected the pulp and put it in barrels labelled “Artisanal Ketchup”—the hipsters would buy that…

David Sadler-Coppard: As with these large vfx tasks we started simple and just grew it organically.  We thought we might be able to tackle the ground tomatoes with a procedural setup which looked good but was not very directable. We ended up creating several tomato chunks of different sizes and scattering them with some logic to that as well as a general ‘pulpy’ layer which was essentially large patches of displaced geo, randomly scattered around to fill out the square.

The advantage of this is we had lots of flexibility to move things around and generate IDs for comp, but it was very heavy to work with. We also used the lidar to hold out sections of the tomatoes to help them feel more embedded into the ground.

From there it was really nailing down the shading of everything. We did lots of work on the ‘wetness’  and spent a long time really pushing the liquid feel as much as we could not just in the lighting but well into the compositing as well. Specifically in comp, our Lead Emily Vaillincourt (find her on IMDb | LinkedIn) built a whole fake reflection system using the data passes and roto to help create the wet feeling as it was a common note and a tricky one to address.

The client was also keen on having tomatoes smushed into the cracks and gathering in corners and this is where the texture passes in comp really helped as the CG didn’t always fit exactly.

We did pick several ‘key’ shots across all the different angles and lighting conditions and worked these up first to try and find the look the director was happy with. We did have some issues getting a consistent look across all the shots, as not only did the lighting change quite significantly, we would receive quite specific notes on singular shots, and had to constantly extrapolate them across the sequence.

Creatively we found that if we had enough variation and breakup across the shots especially the wide shots within the lighting then the shots usually looked successful. We did research on the actual Tomatina Festival and the whole plaza quickly turns into a very uniform pulp which, if we had recreated perfectly, probably wouldn’t have looked as interesting compared to what we ended up with. So I suppose there was a small element of stylisation to our tomatina. 

DP: There are a lot of people in that square. How did you handle the crowds? 

David Sadler-Coppard: Honestly, the CG crowd component was significantly reduced in the final film so there isn’t a huge amount to talk about. Production did manage to shoot with a very large amount of SA’s and several larger shots used tiled plates or element plates to help fill out the square. O

ur biggest crowd shot was the drone shot showing the entire square and festival from the air and that used a crowd system within houdini using animated caches, some made in house and some using stock animations, with some logic on the layout and animations themselves. We had to match the overall density and look for the crowd with surrounding real plates so that was a little tough. 

DP: Any unexpected “aha!” moments?

David Sadler-Coppard: We had several concepts for key shots in the film that were approved on the first or second pass, which was a pleasant surprise — normally there’s a lot more back-and-forth. I suppose we got a bit lucky!

One memorable moment came when we delivered a nearly final version of a huge, complex building destruction shot, fire, smoke, the works. That’s when the VFX Supervisor told us it needed to be in HFR, meaning we had to re-simulate all the fire and smoke. The team had to find a way to preserve the overall fire composition while adjusting the frame rate, and they pulled it off brilliantly.

It wasn’t exactly an “aha” moment, but getting our first big tomato shots approved was a real relief. That was when we knew our quality level was locked in, and the finish line was in sight.

We faced plenty of technical challenges internally, though most were to do with pipeline and rendering,  not the most glamorous side of VFX. Working with heavy deep passes and at native 4K anamorphic meant we had to be extremely optimised and rely on well-structured templates in comp to keep things running smoothly.

DP: About that scene in the safe house: How many iterations on the exploding door/Claymore?

David Sadler-Coppard: We were given an offline temp for the beat of the exploded safehouse door. The concept made sense in principle, but it got me thinking about how to make it work in reality. We explored a range of angles and animation tests with our animation team and client editorial, fine-tuning timings and composition until we had approval.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the corridor needed to be built in CG, but it became obvious once we considered the specific lenses and angles the client wanted — it just wasn’t feasible to shoot practically. The exact moment when the claymore is triggered took some back-and-forth. In the end, we decided to create a proximity sensor in our CG claymore, complete with a blinking light, to guide the audience through the action.

The final version ended up quite different from v1. Initially, we worked over the supplied plates, which featured simpler camera moves. The door animation itself remained largely the same, but the cameras evolved into something far more dynamic.

DP: And, after running that through sim: Would that actually work? Or is it complete Hollywood Physics?

David Sadler-Coppard: It was a combination of research and references. The client had mentioned the Matrix elevator fire shot which was a good reference and we started with that. Essentially the explosions were all smoke simulations with a fire shader applied to them which gave us these nice undulating rolling fire shapes. We didn’t have any practical fire in camera in any shots so we were free to design it as needed.

During the initial explosion simulations, it quickly became clear they needed a fair amount of direction in terms of scale and timing to keep the action readable. The client was also keen to make them all feel very “dirty”, full of texture and detail,  even though, in reality, the blast would probably just blow out the sensor completely.

And as for the flying door… I’m almost certain it would never bounce back and forth so cleanly, but that’s Hollywood for you. We did experiment with it ricocheting around the corridor or shattering into dented fragments with a lot more impact, but it never quite looked right, and the director wasn’t a fan of those versions anyway.

DP: The shot with the two characters in the VERY small lift: Was that the easiest shot ever? Or am I missing something?

David Sadler-Coppard: This was one of the first shots we started on, and, as often happens, it became one of the last to final. The client had a clear vision for a dynamic raking light-and-shadow effect playing across the wall behind the characters, so we built the entire environment in CG to give full control. We carefully layered in details,  mortar, texture, even cobwebs, to give the space a gritty, lived-in feel.

Later, we explored adding subtle camera shake and sway to enhance the sense of atmosphere and movement. After refining it together through multiple iterations, we reached a version everyone loved, approved towards the end of the show.

DP: And, of all the 239 shots – what is your personal favourite shot?

David Sadler-Coppard: I’m incredibly proud of all the Tomatina work, and of the entire team who brought it to life. It was an emotional journey with plenty of late nights, but seeing it come together was worth every moment. Let’s just say I’ll never look at a bottle of Heinz quite the same way again.

DP: And finally, what’s next for you and the Milk team? Are you staying out of food fights for a while?

David Sadler-Coppard: Milk has several exciting projects coming up and I am nearly wrapped on The Witcher Season 4 myself. It’s an exciting, if slightly nerve-wracking time in the industry right now, but working with a talented, passionate, artistic team on such a tough but rewarding job reminds you why you love VFX in the first place. 

The post Tomato Warfare: Milk VFX on Heads of State first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Phantom Digital Effects Ltd, parent to PhantomFX, Spectre Post and Tippett Studio, has entered into an agreement in principle to acquire Milk VFX and Lola Post}. These two UK and European VFX houses bring an award-winning history, technical expertise, and expanded geographic scope to the Phantom portfolio (PhantomFX blog).

Milk VFX, founded in London in 2013 with further locations in Barcelona, Bordeaux, and Dublin, is known for high-end episodic television and features. Credits include the Academy Award-winning Ex Machina, four BAFTA TV Craft Awards (Troy: Fall of a City, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Doctor Who), and a Creative Arts Emmy for Sherlock.

Lola Post, established in 2000, has decades of experience in factual, specialist factual, and original drama, with additional BAFTA and Emmy recognition.

Europe Joins the Phantom Map

The acquisition expands Phantom’s reach into Europe, complementing the group’s Asian/Pacific and North American activities. This follows the previous integration of Tippett Studio, the launch of Spectre Post, and the recent establishment of Phantom China. Milk VFX had already brought Lola Post into its group as a sister studio in 2022; both will now operate under the wider Phantom umbrella, with no planned changes to team structure or leadership. Phantom CEO and founder Bejoy Arputharaj described the deal as a “major step forward” that “deepens the integration” of Phantom’s studio ecosystem.

No Shakeup: Teams and Brands Stay Intact

Post-acquisition, both Milk VFX and Lola Post will continue with their own names and creative teams. Chris Burn remains group managing director. At Milk, Sara Bennett (Chief Creative Officer), Neil Roche (Deputy Chief Creative Officer), and Jean-Claude Deguara (Production VFX Supervisor) keep their existing roles. At Lola Post, Rob Harvey remains Creative Director. Both studios retain their teams, infrastructure, and creative direction, with Phantom aiming for expanded capacity without disrupting creative output.

The post Phantom FX Scoops Up Milk VFX and Lola Post first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Lighting just got a new shape—yours. With the release of HDR Light Studio 9.1 (build 2025.0711, 17 July 2025), Lightmap has thrown out the rigid light primitives and handed artists a flexible, editable curve. Dubbed Lumi‑Curve, this new feature lets you draw freeform light strokes directly on the Render View, sculpting everything from stylized reflections to complex highlight trails in real time.

What Is Lumi‑Curve?

Lumi‑Curve is not another variation on the softbox. It is an entirely new, curve-based light type where the core is a line you plot and edit, not a fixed circle or rectangle. Each side of the curve can be independently softened or sharpened with falloff controls, allowing highly nuanced light gradients. You place control points (nodes) in the Render View, dragging and warping the curve to follow object contours or define unique light paths. The result updates instantly in both the HDR canvas and your connected DCC.

Use Cases: More Than a Pretty Arc

Lumi‑Curve is all about control and creativity where standard HDRI or primitive lights fall flat:

• Shaped Highlights: Create continuous, non-uniform highlights that flow across curved surfaces, eliminating the tiled or disconnected look from stacking multiple round lights.
• Glowing Arcs and Trails: Draw arcs behind a model for stylized background glows or graphic accents. When trails overlap, the brightness stacks additively, perfect for dynamic, motion-driven VFX or glossy product renders.
• Projector Mode: Set the curve’s “spread” to zero to turn it into a projected light brush—handy for painting animated highlights that follow the path of your line.
• Non-Linear Horizon Lines: Stretch a Lumi‑Curve across the HDRI canvas to create complex, curved horizon lines or to mask and structure environmental backgrounds. Artists can use these for both soft ambient transitions and hard-edged graphic beams.

Under the Hood: How It Works

• Control Points: Place and move nodes in the Render View to define and refine your curve’s shape.
• Falloff Gradients: Adjust the softness or hardness on either side of your curve with precise falloff parameters.
• Real-Time Feedback: See changes live both in HDR Light Studio’s canvas and in any connected DCC (3ds Max, Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D, Houdini, and more).

Platform, Plugins, and Pricing

HDR Light Studio 9.1 runs on Windows 10/11, macOS 11.4+ (Big Sur or later), and CentOS 7.9+ or compatible Linux distributions. Plugin support includes 3ds Max 2023–2026, Blender 3.6.12+ (including Apple Silicon), Cinema 4D 2023–2025, and others—maintaining the broad integration essential for pipeline artists.

Pricing for 2025: the ‘Indie’ tier has been dropped. Pro node-locked licenses are $540/year (up $95), Pro floating $1,140/year (up $165), Automotive node-locked $1,620 (up $125), and Automotive floating $2,460 (up $215). HDR Light Studio remains subscription-only.

The Takeaway: A Lighting Brush for 2025

Lumi‑Curve doesn’t just add a new shape—it changes the act of lighting into an act of drawing. From automotive-grade specular sweeps to stylized trails for motion graphics, the feature’s flexibility supports a new breed of artist-driven light design, all inside the familiar, DCC-linked HDR Light Studio interface.

As always, test new workflows in real production environments to confirm performance, stability, and expected results—especially with heavy HDR scenes and complex DCC links.

---

Cited Sources:
// Lumi‑Curve reference, features, workflows // Lightmap: Lumi‑Curve Content Reference
// Official release notes, system/platform requirements // Lightmap: HDR Light Studio 9.1.0 Release Notes

The post HDR Light Studio 9.1 Lumi‑Curve Turns Lighting into Line Art—Literally first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Gene Roddenberry’s team shot the first pilot episode for “Star Trek” back in 1964. The Anderson Company, which was part of Desilu, the production company, was responsible for the visual and optical effects for both pilot episodes as well as the following episodes. However, the Anderson Company was already hopelessly overwhelmed when editing the effects for the first regularly filmed episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver”.

At the time, nobody was prepared for the mass of visual effects that a weekly science fiction series would entail. Before Star Trek there was “Lost in Space” and “Buck Rogers”, but here you were surprised if you didn’t see the strings on which a model was hanging. The quality standards for Star Trek were different.

Star Trek was also the first science fiction series to be shot in colour, which significantly increased the effort and problems involved. What’s more, the cinema was just showing what science fiction could look like: “The Time Machine” from 1960 or “Fantastic Voyage” from 1966, which won an Oscar for its groundbreaking effects, naturally also increased the pressure of expectation on the makers of Star Trek.

In desperation, producers Gene Roddenberry and Robert Justman hired Eddie Milkis, who had previously worked as an editor. He quickly realised that the sheer number of effects shots, or opticals as they were called at the time, could not be managed by one effects house, but rather by all the effects houses that existed in Hollywood at the time. And so Milkis became probably the first post-production supervisor in our industry, even though this job title didn’t even exist back then. He was listed in the credits as a production assistant.

The practice that is common in our industry today of distributing shots to several service providers and coordinating them in terms of content, design and economics by a studio-side supervisor thus took place for the first time on “Star Trek”. But visual effects not only created problems, they also solved some of them: Beaming the crew around Kirk and Spock was not only a futuristic means of transport, it also solved the problem of having to land the Enterprise or one of its shuttles in every episode – an effect that would have been much more costly than a dissolve between the take with the actors and a corresponding cleanplate.

The actual transporter effect was applied to this dissolve with the help of an Oxberry printer – moving aluminium shavings, illuminated by a strong light, transported our heroes to alien worlds. Incidentally, the fact that the Enterprise ended up with a shuttle at all was thanks to one of the first and probably most creative merchandise deals of all time. The company AMT Ertl was granted the licence to sell Star Trek model kits. In return, AMT promised to build a full-size model of the shuttle for filming – another way of keeping the ever-exploding budget down.

The Enterprise itself was built as a model in three sizes: A twelve centimetre model, one ninety centimetres long and a detailed version four and a half metres long. The materials used were balsa wood and plastic, which didn’t exactly make filming any easier, but modern materials such as fibreglass were still rather experimental at the time. There was also little motion control technology available, which meant that both the movements of the Enterprise and the lighting were limited. The shots of the Enterprise were filmed in black and white and then recoloured on the Oxberry printer and punched in front of the appropriate planet of the week.

This process of re-colouring also explains why the Enterprise often had a different colour cast in different episodes. It was particularly noticeable when the producers used another cost-cutting measure: the recycling of optical effects. Especially exterior shots of the Enterprise, when it was not shown in orbit around the planet of the respective episode, were often shown several times. For example, the Enterprise could fly around a planet with a reddish tinge, only to chase the Klingons a few minutes later in the most beautiful blue.

Especially in the third season, when the budget was radically slashed, this can be observed very often. But every trick in the book was used to transport viewers into the twenty-third century. The beams from the phasers were painted frame by frame for both the live action shots and the model shots of the Enterprise – whether the phaser was red, green or blue often depended in the end on which effects house was responsible for the respective shot.

Today, the effects may seem antiquated or even ridiculous in some cases, but you should really bear in mind that “Star Trek” was the first series to work with effects on this scale. Whereas other series had perhaps two or three visual effects shots per episode, one episode of “Star Trek” easily had twenty such shots on the television screen.

Star Trek’s path to the cinema led through many stages of “development hell”. Several projects were considered and then cancelled until Paramount Pictures, now the rights holder of Star Trek after the acquisition of Desilu Studios, decided to send the Enterprise on a second five-year mission. Star Trek – Phase II was to become the cornerstone of a new television channel. Sets were built, scripts written, test recordings made – and then everything changed. After the success of “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Paramount now saw Star Trek as an opportunity to bring something similar to the big screen.

The script for the pilot episode of “Phase II” was thus developed into a two-hour opus and Robert Wise, known for “The Sound of Music”, “The Day the Earth stood still” and “The Andromeda Strain”, was hired as the director. Without going into too much detail about the drama behind the scenes, it is important to know that the script was constantly changed.

Screenwriter Harold Livingston was in a constant battle with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy insisted on changes on their part and, to add to the pressure, Paramount had the film booked for a fixed date in cinemas. On the seventh of December 1979, “Star Trek – The Motion Picture” had to flicker across the screen or the studio would be heavily sued.

Robert Abel and Associates was chosen as the effects house at the time. This company had made a name for itself in Hollywood with groundbreaking commercials for the time – but also with notorious delays and exploding budgets. Concerned about this situation, Paramount brought Douglas Trumbull onto the project as a consultant in August 1978. Trumbull had already been responsible for the visual effects on Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 – A Space Odyssey” and was working at the time for the Paramount company “Magicam”.

When it became clear that Abel and Associates would not be able to meet the deadline, which was so critical for Paramount, Trumbull took over the visual effects and was thus given carte blanche on the project in many respects, also with regard to the finances. Meeting the release date was so important to those responsible at Paramount that the budget was increased several times and ended up at 44 million US dollars – originally calculated at 15 million.

But even Douglas Trumbull could not cope with the mass of visual effects on his own, which is why John Dykstra’s Apogee Studios also came into play. While today it is common practice for several companies to work on the effects of a single film, this cooperation caused additional logistical problems at the time. While Trumbull’s Entertainment Effects Groups Pipeline relied entirely on 65 mm film, Apogee worked with Vistavision. All live action scenes were shot on anamorphic 35mm.

The film contains some beautiful shots and groundbreaking effects: Marvellous flights through the giant alien probe called “V’ger”, all an evolution of the slit scan process from “2001”, the wormhole effect, and of course the almost nine-minute flight around the completely refurbished U.S.S. Enterprise – to this day a breathtaking sequence that fans like to call “ship porn”. Never before and rarely since has the Enterprise looked so good. And yet, to this day, one still has the impression that the film comes across as long-winded, elegiac and bloated. Here, too, the fans have found a fitting name: “Star Trek – The Motionless Picture”.

There is a reason for these lengths – in addition to weaknesses in the script. The effects were largely completed so late that they were used in full length in the editing process – there was simply no time for a proper editorial process. In the end, it was so tight that director Robert Wise personally took the still wet film reel of the fifth act to the premiere.

Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding “Star Trek – The Motion Picture” were nothing less than a perfect storm for the fledging VFX industry. The deadline was set in stone, the film had to be finished. If you study the credits of this first cinema adventure carefully, you will realise how many remarkable careers began here.

The Genesis trilogy

The budget, which had exploded from the original fifteen to forty-four million dollars, was still a very sour pill for Paramount to swallow. Nevertheless, they wanted to send the Enterprise on another journey, perhaps this time a little more profitably than with the first film. Paramount turned to Harve Bennett, then a producer in the TV department of Paramount Pictures. When asked if he could make a Star Trek film for less than 44 million dollars, he replied that he could make three of these films for the budget. He was to keep his word: “Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan”, with a budget of 11 million dollars, was to become one of the most successful films in the franchise.

Industrial Light and Magic, although still busy with “Return of the Jedi”, opened its doors to other clients at this time, and one of the first was Paramount Pictures for the Enterprise’s latest adventure. Some shots could be recycled from the first film – just like they did on the TV series. When the Enterprise leaves Earth, it’s a radically edited version of the dry dock sequence from “The Motion Picture”, and the simulated battle with the Klingons has also been seen before.

Nevertheless, the film has a completely contrasting look, much denser and more compressed than the opulent first film. This is also reflected in the techniques used. For example, the Mutara nebula, in which Admiral Kirk duels with the eponymous Khan at the end, was not created using slit scan technology, but in a water tank. Different coloured liquids with different viscosities were mixed and filmed at a high frame rate. The Enterprise in battle with the U.S.S. Reliant were then visually superimposed over this nebula. “Star Trek” probably benefited greatly from the experience ILM had gained with “Star Wars”, especially with the use of motion control and the impressive orgy of destruction at the end of the film.

The masterminds at ILM used another clever trick in the two battle sequences between the Enterprise and the Reliant: In order to have a believable scale during the explosions, especially of flames, details that were destroyed were built as a partial model on a larger scale. This meant that a warp nacelle could explode without looking as if it had been hit by a gigantic Bunsen burner.

In another respect, however, “The Wrath of Khan” broke completely new ground and has a unique effect sequence that can hardly be underestimated for our industry as a whole: the genesis sequence, in which the creation of a planet from the impact of a torpedo on a dead celestial body to its transformation into a living planet with mountains, valleys, meadows and lakes is shown in a one-shot, is the first completely computer-generated sequence to be used in a cinema film. It was created before Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division. This division was renamed Pixar shortly afterwards.

Two years later, “Star Trek III – The Search for Spock” followed. Ince again the effects where made by ILM, and the aforementioned Genesis sequence was once again recycled. The film is quite solid in terms of the effects, but suffers a little from the conditions in the TV department. The scenes on the Genesis planet unfortunately show that they were filmed in the studio and not in Hawaii, as cinematographer Charles Correll wanted. The destruction of the iconic Enterprise, however, is still an eye-catcher even after almost forty years and has definitely aged well.

“Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home” is not really a film that makes you think primarily of groundbreaking visual effects,as most of the film is set in the 1980’s San Francisco. What is remarkable, however, is the journey through time that Kirk and his crew manage by warping around our sun. During this flight, we see a somewhat etheral scene in which the CGI heads of our heroes morph into one another. Back then, the actors were scanned in a construction that seems crude today and which, in retrospect, can be seen as the great-grandfather of today’s light stages. Quite remarkable for the year 1986.

Never change a winning team

“Star Trek V – The final Frontier” was not only to be William Shatner’s directorial debut, but also to continue the success of “The Voyage Home”. However, competition in the 1989 cinema summer was fierce and ILM was already busy with films such as “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and “Ghostbusters II”. Worried that ILM would only be able to let the “C-Team” work on Star Trek V, the decision was made in favour of the effects house Assoicates and Ferren from the east coast of the USA.

As with “The Motion Picture”, they opted for an effects house from the advertising sector and overlooked the fact that this company did not necessarily have the right pipeline to handle the effects for a science fiction motion picture. The distance between Hollywood and Long Island, New York caused additional problems in the approval processes, as did the lack of experience and the obvious disinterest in the effects of director William Shatner.

Many of the effects in the “Galactic Barrier” appear overlit, the Enterprise is poorly integrated or not integrated at all and the overall proportions in the film don’t seem appropriate. The approach of Associates and Ferren was also fundamentally different to that of ILM. While ILM had already refined the bluescreen technique for itself at the time, Bran Ferren was absolutely unwilling to work in this way.

To make matters worse, between “The Voyage Home” and “The Final Frontier”, the model of the Enterprise had been loaned out to film an attraction at Universal Studios. The effects company responsible had sprayed the model with a matt finish, presumably to prevent blue screen spill. The elaborate mother-of-pearl effect that the Enterprise had been given for “The Motion Picture” had to be reapplied over a period of several weeks.

Whether or not, as William Shatner claims, better effects or even the ominous stone creatures he wanted for the film’s finale but was denied for budget reasons would have made the film better in the end is up to debate. What is certain is that “The Final Frontier” was considered a flop at Paramount and the sixth and final film with the original cast only came about because Paramount did not want to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of “Star Trek” without a film in the cinema.

For “Star Trek VI – The Undiscovered Country”, they once again relied on the experience of ILM, who were able to contribute their expertise to the destruction of the Klingon moon Praxis and the morphing of the model Iman into William Shatner.

Back to television

While “Star Trek” had established itself well as a franchise in the cinema, Paramount wanted to bring the Enterprise back to television. And even though “Star Trek – The Next Generation” was seventy-eight years past Kirk, Spock and co. in the future, there were to be some synergies between the franchise in the cinema and the new series on television in the here and now. For the pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint”, ILM was once again commissioned to create the visual effects for the new Enterprise.

Probably the most important shot here is the scene in the opening credits in which the Enterprise goes to warp speed. The rubber band effect, where the front part of the ship appears to be flying away while the rear part is still stationary, was created by a combination of motion control, slit scan and the use of a streak camera.

The original plan was for ILM to create a kind of stock library of effects shots, which would then be used as required during production, thus minimising the need for new effects shots. However, it was soon realised that, apart from the usual fly-by shots, each script required very individual settings, so this library could only be used to a limited extent.

It was originally assumed that around ten new effects shots would be needed per episode. However, this very quickly levelled off at an average of sixty effects shots, and in particularly effects-heavy episodes it was as high as one hundred. However, the aforementioned warp effect was so complex and cost-intensive to produce that there were only two different shots available for the 178 episodes in which the Enterprise went to warp – because even though the effect only lasts a few seconds each time, the pure shooting time for a single shot was two days due to the many passes and long exposures for the rubber band effect described above.

It is interesting to note that the producers of the new series were seriously considering realising the effects entirely in CG at the time – in 1987. It would be another six years before another science fiction series – namely “Babylon 5” – was prepared to take this risk. The documentary “The Trek not taken” (included on the Blu Ray edition of “The Next Generation” Season 3) shows fascinating test footage and is astonishingly open about the decision-making process as to why the decision was ultimately made in favour of classic model shots.

What was a massive innovation in “The Next Generation”, however, was that it was edited on D1 video. This decision not only brought cost savings, but also greater flexibility. Phaser beams could now be created on a real monitor, effects footage could be used and reused much more flexibly and new effects systems such as Quantel’s Mirage and later Harry and Henry were used. And it was only with this change that the desire for a serious stock library could be fulfilled: From the third season of “The Next Generation”, the effects shots were also no longer optically printed, but digitally comped. And so the same shot of the Enterprise could also appear in orbit around different planets.

The transition to CGI

The success of “The Next Generation” heralded the first golden age of Star Trek. This became apparent in 1993 when a second Star Trek series was launched in parallel for the first time with “Star Trek – Deep Space Nine”
was launched in parallel. While CGI elements tended to be the exception in “The Next Generation”, such as the crystal being in “Silicon Avatar”, “Deep Space Nine” was to have a main character, the shape-shifter Odo, whose production included regular morphs. The company responsible for this was VisionArt Design & Animation; this iconic effect was designed by Dennis Blakey, who was deservedly honoured with an Emmy for his work.

in 1995, “The Next Generation” left the TV screen for the cinema, making way for “Star Trek – Voyager”. Star Trek on television was a well-oiled machine at this point, and so things were done the way they had always been done. In terms of the spaceships and stations, this meant that in the mid-nineties, most of the filming was done with models and miniatures. But science fiction was booming and so there were several other shows vying for viewers’ favour.

One of these was the ambitious “Babylon 5” by J. Michael Straczynski. The exterior and effects shots for this show were entirely CG, rendered on several Amiga 2000s with Video Toaster hardware and the associated Lightwave 3D. That way, Foundation Imaging, the VFX vendor for “Babylon 5”, avoided the purchase of expensive Silicon Graphics hardware. This cost saving turned out to be so successful that the producers decided early on in the course of “Babylon 5” to realise the effects “in house” using the same business model, and so Foundation Imaging was relatively quickly left without its biggest customer.

Star Trek Voyager was just in its first season at the time, but thanks to successful lobbying, more and more of the effects went to Foundation Imaging. Foundation Imaging took over the CGI model that Amblin Imaging had previously created for the title sequence – in fact, the CGI model was used in three shots, in the others it is a classic model – and prepared it so well in the episode that from the fourth season of Voyager onwards virtually all exterior shots were created in CG on this basis. However, the need for CGI also grew on the sister show “Deep Space Nine”.

The more the conflict with the Dominion came to a head in the show, the more opulent the space battles became – these scenes could not have been realised with classic models and motion control. Originally, there was to be a fixed separation, with Foundation Imaging responsible for “Voyager” and Digital Muse for “Deep Space Nine”. A nice plan, but it didn’t do justice to the reality of production. For example, Foundation Imaging helped out with the finale of the fifth season of “Deep Space Nine”, “Sacrifice of Angels”, to stage the conquest of the space station by the Dominion.

How to meet up legends

The “Deep Space Nine” episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” was a highlight in more ways than one. In view of the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary at the time, the idea was to take the crew around Sisko & Co. back to the time of Kirk and Spock – and have them meet their heroes there. The concept gave the producers quite a headache. Although Paramount had just released “Forrest Gump”, a film that accomplished exactly the same task – integrating a contemporary actor into old archive material – the question remained as to whether this was also possible within the constraints of a television series.

The answer came when the team led by VFX supervisor Gary Hutzel showed the producers a scene from the original episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”. They were a little confused as it was just a normal scene. It wasn’t until the second playback that they noticed the security officer in the background, who was not an actor from the sixties but a VFX artist from the nineties. With this proof of concept, one of the most elaborate Star Trek episodes of all time was given the green light.

As the original model of the Enterprise was on loan to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, Gary Hutzel had a new model built. Unfortunately, the models of the Klingon ship and the K-7 space station had been destroyed in the meantime, which is why new models had to be built as well. To this day, it has to be said that the effort was well worth it – the effects still hold up today and the attention to detail of everyone involved can be seen in every scene.

Rarely have VFX and the on-set team worked so closely together as on this episode. Parts of the original sets of both the Enterprise and the K-7 space station were recreated. The typical lighting of the original series was meticulously recreated. The original negative of the old episode was completely rescanned and the corresponding scenes were matchmoved. With the help of a lot of compositing and rotoscoping, wonderful scenes were created in which O’Brien and Bashir help Scotty and Chekov in a brawl against the Klingons and Dax is allowed to pine after her dream Vulcan. No expense or effort was spared for the exterior shots either.

Meanwhile in the cinema

When “The Next Generation” said it’s farewell to the television screen, this crew went straight to the big screen. Within two weeks, the existing sets were polished up for the cinema and the long-awaited, but ultimately somewhat disappointing, meeting between Captain Kirk and Captain Picard took place.

Even if the film falls short of its potential, the makers did take advantage of one opportunity – they got rid of the model of the “Next Generation” Enterprise that the VFX artists hated in a spectacular way. The NCC-1701-D was often referred to as the “Hilton Hotel in space” due to its wide curved shapes and its aesthetics borrowed from the 1980s. In fact, the model was extremely difficult to stage due to its size and proportions. So what could be more obvious than to blow it up?

The resulting sequence is truly impressive: the Enterprise’s large saucer section separates from the engine section about to explode and tries to escape, but is pushed into the atmosphere of a planet by the force of the explosion and crash lands in a jungle. This landing in particular, as this massive saucer mows away row after row of trees and leaves a trail of devastation, is a prime example of believable shots with miniatures and models.

Two years later, it was time for the Next Generation crew’s first independent adventure. “First Contact” not only had the Enterprise crew travelling through time again, it also brought back the most feared antagonists: the Borg. To give the huge collective a face, the filmmakers created the Borg Queen. In order to showcase this symbiosis between the natural and the artificial, there is a scene in the film in which the Queen’s head, complete with mechanical spine, is placed in a torso. Here, too, plenty of matchmoving, CGI and morphing were used – if there was anything at all to criticise about this scene, it was that the original one-shot was subsequently intercut.

“Star Trek – Insurrection” followed and, like the two previous instalments, got the Industrial Light & Magic treatment. Only with the last of the four “The Next Generation” films, “Nemesis”, did the effects go to another company, this time to Digital Domain. And as with the television series, the trend here was increasingly towards digital models, although the company did not want to completely abandon the miniatures – these were used in the Enterprise’s ramming manoeuvre with the Reman ship.

Back to budget

in 1999, “Deep Space Nine” ended its run with seven seasons and 176 episodes, followed two years later by “Voyager”. The management at Paramount wanted to launch another Star Trek series, this time, in keeping with the times, a prequel. For “Enterprise”, they used completely digital models for the first time. They also had the foresight to produce the series not only in 16:9, but also in HD – even though the effects were only produced in 720p.

Unfortunately, “Enterprise” was not very successful. Various factors, which were summarised by the producers at the time under the term “franchise fatigue”, but which were much more complex, did not put “Enterprise” under a favourable star. The fact that “Nemesis” was squeezed in between “Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers” and “James Bond – Die Another Day” at the box office didn’t really help either and so the third season of “Enterprise” was supposed to be the end. Only the switch from film to HD video and slashing the budget by half made the fourth season possible, which is still regarded as the best by many fans today.

Remastering

But before “Star Trek” was sent back to sleep after seventeen uninterrupted years on air, a whole new chapter began that brought its own challenges in terms of VFX: remastering.

Let’s go back a little, more precisely back to the first motion picture, “Star Trek – The Motion Picture”. As described at the beginning, the film was made under enormous time pressure and never received a proper polish. Director Robert Wise considered the version that was shown in the cinema at the time to be a rough cut. To make matters worse, an “extended version” was released on the American channel ABC in 1983, in which unused material was added in, bloating the film up even more.

This version included a scene in which Kirk leaves the Enterprise and the entire studio construction, including tripods, can still be seen on the right-hand side. in 2001, Foundation Imaging, together with Daren Dochtermann, David C. Fein and Michael Matessino, set about creating a real director’s cut of the film under the direction of Robert Wise – twenty-two years after the release of the original version.

Cuts were trimmed, the sound was mixed better and effects shots were either reworked or in some cases even completely recreated. For example, obvious logical errors were removed, such as the fact that Spock holds his hands protectively in front of his eyes on the planet Vulcan to avoid looking at the sun, which was simply not present in the original edit. And “V’Ger”, the film’s antagonist, also finally takes shape in the Director’s Edition. In the original version, you could always see the energy cloud surrounding V’Ger and close up shots, but never the ship in its entirety, which was somewhat underwhelming.

Last but not least, dialogue scenes were removed that were obviously only there to explain missing effects shots on the narrative level. And all this… in standard definition. With the advent of Blu-ray and streaming services, to call this cost-cutting measure by the studio “short-sighted” in retrospect is a grandiose understatement. It was to take another 20 years before the 4K remaster of “The Motion Picture” was released in April 2022.

However, this experience was not the only reason why Paramount and CBS in particular, who now held the rights to the TV series, began to think more long-term. The effects of the original series in particular no longer really stood up to modern viewing habits. After there had already been several “digitally mastered” versions of the series as a video release, a remastering was to take place in 2006, just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the series, which would bring the original series into the 21st century:

All 79 episodes were re-scanned, re-graded, the sound optimised and, what was definitely considered controversial at the time, new CGI scenes of the Enterprise were produced. CBS Digital, which was responsible for this, faced several challenges: Firstly, the aesthetics, the pace, the whole style had to match the legal content from the 1960s.

The credo that Mike and Denise Okuda, who worked as consultants for CBS Digital, issued to the team was simple: the effects had to look like the original team behind Gene Roddenberry would have done them if they had had the technical possibilities of 2006. Nevertheless, the constant repetition of shots, which was unavoidable in the original version for cost reasons, should no longer occur. The aspect ratio remained conservative: the old series was designed for 4:3 and that’s how it should stay.

Anyone watching it on a modern-day disply will have to live with pillar boxes. But there was another problem in addition to tight deadlines: as the show was cut to film and the uncut rushes were no longer available, the new scenes had to be exactly the same length as the original shots. It became even more complicated when effects shots were faded. But no expense or effort was spared when it came to cleaning up the old negative.

What the software did not recognise as dirt or scratches was painstakingly painted out frame by frame on Flame and Inferno. The new “remastered” versions are now available on Netflix, iTunes and the like. However, a special feature is reserved for Blu-ray owners: Here you can seamlessly switch back and forth between the original and remastered effects.

The CBS Digital team worked on these remasterings for three years. After that, “The Next Generation” was to receive a similar remastering, but the challenges here were completely different. Unlike the original series, “The Next Generation” was comped and edited on video. This meant that over 25,000 rolls of film had to be retrieved from the archives, scanned in HD, cleaned and graded. However, a different approach was taken for the effects shots, as the negative with the individual elements of the effects was still well preserved.

And so the shots from the eighties and nineties were scanned layer by layer and recomped in Flame. Although some of the planets were given more detail, the camera angles and movements remained very close to the original. Other effects, such as screen inserts, beaming or phaser beams were recreated in HD, but only very rarely did they deviate stylistically from the SD original. In “The next Generation”, the preserving approach was even greater than in the original series.

One would expect that “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” would also be brought up to date afterwards, but fans are still waiting in vain for this to happen. Remastering the first season of “Next Generation” alone cost CBS Digital nine million dollars at the time. At the same time, Blu-ray sales were slowly dwindling in favour of streaming.

To make matters worse, as already described, “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” relied more and more on CGI in their initial production rin. The assets were considered lost in the meantime, as shops such as Foundation Imaging have since closed their doors. You can get a small glimpse of how good “Deep Space Nine” would look in HD in the documentary “What we left behind – a Look back at Star Trek Deep Space Nine”.

Thanks to very successful crowdfunding, the producers of that documentary were able to remaster fifteen minutes of footage in HD – including the breathtaking battle from “Sacrifice of Angels”. It seems that someone had made a backup of old Lightwave files after all. Whether and when fans will be able to enjoy full length high-definition episodes of these two series is still uncertain. Some are hoping for AI upscaling, others for Paramount, the streaming service where Star Trek now has its home.

in 2005, “Enterprise” went off the air and Star Trek disappeared into its second slumber. Star Trek was not due to return until 2009, but in a big way. The Enterprise was to return to the cinema and also be freed from the moderate budgets that had accompanied the film series from the second part onwards. The film was directed by J.J. Abrams.

The whole look was to be younger, more modern and more realistic. The effects were once again handled by Industrial Light and Magic, this time under the direction of Roger Guyett. What really sets the film’s effects apart is the focus on a realistic environment. A scene in which Kirk and Sulu jump onto a drilling platform high above the planet Vulcan was actually shot on a replica of part of this platform outdoors.

The rest of the platform was added in CG afterwards, but you can tell that the actors are in a tangible environment and that they are standing in real sunlight. None of this is unusual today, but when you consider that films like “Revenge of the Sith” were shot entirely in front of blue and green screen just a few years earlier, it’s fair to say that “Star Trek” (2009) was definitely a trend-setter here.

in 2012, “Star Trek – Into Darkness” continued in the same vein. And in the meantime, the shots were also distributed to several service providers, which is why Kirk & Co. were also worked on at the Pixomondo locations in Frankfurt and Stuttgart. 2016 saw the release of “Star Trek – Beyond”, the latest member of the Star Trek cinema family. Over 900 people around the world worked on the VFX, at least 300 of whom were credited in the end credits after tough negotiations. With streaming, increasingly on Paramount , Star Trek is currently experiencing its second golden age and continues to set standards in terms of VFX.

Conclusion

While in other franchises it was the visions of the respective creators that pushed the boundaries of what was possible with VFX, with Star Trek it was often more a matter of necessity. In the beginning, the pressure to take viewers to alien worlds in twenty-six episodes a year made them inventive. Paramount’s blind booking of “The Motion Picture” acted as an incubator for the still very young VFX scene in Hollywood and the Genesis sequence was an opportunity for Ed Cadmull’s team at Pixar to show where CGI was still going.

Later, “Voyager” filled the gap in Foundation Imaging left by “Babylon 5” and paved the way for CGI in the science fiction genre, from which other shows such as “Battlestar Galactica” would also benefit.

The fact that Star Trek’s effects were often enough orientated towards what was feasible is what makes them so interesting for our industry. Because in the end, the famous song line is true: “Space may be the
final frontier, but it’s made in a Hollywood basement.”

The post The visual effects of Star Trek – a retrospective first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

Creation Effects kindly hands over a cure for digital hayfever: 3D Dust & Pollen Free, a free After Effects preset. Designed to generate realistic simulations of airborne annoyances — including dust, pollen, spores, dander and similar floaty bits — this preset saves artists from turning their studio desks into sneeze zones. For those already suffering IRL, this tool safely limits the pollen load to your pixels only.

Technical Details: What You Actually Get

The preset is fully compatible with Adobe After Effects and relies on native AE tools for all its magic. That means no third-party plugins are required, making it a simple and clean drop-in solution for motion graphics artists and VFX compositors. It uses expressions to drive a particle simulation and is described as working best when applied to 3D null objects (an invisible helper object used in After Effects to control other layers).

The generated particles simulate motion in three-dimensional space, giving you floating flecks that behave like airborne allergens – only this time, you don’t need tissues. According to Toolfarm, the particles are controllable in terms of amount, speed, and randomness, ensuring that users can easily adjust the intensity of the effect from gentle spring breeze to full-blown attic dust storm.

Because the preset is expression-driven and uses only AE’s native features, it promises stability across After Effects versions, assuming your own version supports expressions properly — a relief for anyone who’s ever crashed AE five minutes before deadline. (Not that we know that feeling. At all.)

Free, But With a Particle Storm Warning

As you might have guessed from the name, the preset is absolutely free of charge. You can grab it directly via Creation Effects news post. Pricing can’t get any better than “zero dollars,” but, as always with freebies, production artists should vet the preset thoroughly in their environment before using it in client projects or larger pipeline integrations. Always better to sneeze at test renders than client feedback rounds. Because 3D Dust & Pollen Free leans entirely on After Effects’ built-in toolkit, it’s relatively lightweight and shouldn’t introduce system instability — at least not beyond AE’s usual Monday morning mood swings.

The post Achoo-Free Effects: “3D Dust & Pollen Free” for After Effects first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

After 15 years of organic growth and over 2 million downloads, Nukepedia is getting the infrastructure it deserves. Originally launched at Geekfest during Siggraph 2010 by Frank Rueter, Nukepedia quickly became the backbone of the Nuke compositing community—hosting over 2,000 shared tools, gizmos, scripts, and nodes. What started as a modest forum now sustains an active membership base of more than 900,000 users, making it a key stop in any Nuke artist’s workflow.

Why Rebuild Now?

The platform’s current architecture—built on an amateur setup cobbled together during off-hours—is beginning to strain under its own popularity. And unlike compositing, duct tape doesn’t scale well. That’s why Frank and Kara from the Nukepedia team are preparing for a full Nukepedia 2.0 rebuild, targeting a relaunch at Siggraph 2025. The goal: a stable, fast, and scalable site that doesn’t crash when someone hits “Download.” A new backend is in the works, and the development is already progressing well following a productive meeting with the dev team. However, to cross the finish line, they need both input and funds from the community.

A Community-Supported Rebuild

Enter the user survey and the all-important donation button. Frank and Kara are calling on the community to help shape the future of Nukepedia—without duplicating efforts of existing resources like The Foundry Forum. Instead, they envision Nukepedia becoming a portal that connects users to all relevant compositing resources, without cannibalising what’s already working.

The site will remain free and community-driven, but would ask users to consider a support donation offering a SHORT TIME special offering users FIVE years subscription for the cost of a ONE-year subscription. Their pitch? “Ten beers a year”—a $50 donation will help bridge the financial gap.
The nuBridge plugin, developed by Frank back in 2017 using PySide, has been doing some of the financial heavy lifting. nuBridge integrates directly into Nuke, offering database access and ease-of-use for only $5/month. So far, subscriptions have funded about half the rebuild budget.

Let Nukepedia Know What You Want

Nukepedia is running its survey until the relaunch. While the survey will likely stay open, the team has put 10 May as a cut off for this round of considerations for the rebuild – get your ideas and feedback in now! Community feedback will guide not just technical decisions, but also whether future updates should include visuals, tool previews, and evolving feature screenshots. It’s also a way to ensure they don’t split the community by reinventing wheels already well-oiled elsewhere.

They are also planning to roll out updates incrementally—each reminder accompanied by news on site development, feature previews, or editorial retrospectives. Speaking of which: a walkthrough of Nukepedia’s history and the origin stories of Nuke itself is planned for launch. To warm up, check out these classic interviews with early Nuke devs, which are Bill Spitzak, Paul van Camp and Jonathan Egstad (Who is giving a talk at this years FMX)

What Happens Next?

Once Nukepedia 2.0 is live, the platform could evolve into anything the community wants: curated plugin galleries, integrated learning hubs, or just a faster place to grab that gizmo that “totally fixed the green spill in shot 327.” But until then, Frank and Kara are focused on fundraising and keeping the vision clear: no duplication, no fragmentation, just better access to compositing tools.

You can support the project by subscribing to nuBridge for $5/month, or making a one-off donation (suggested: $50/year – currently gets you FIVE years subscription for one ) via the donation button  on their site.

---

Want to help? Fill out the survey, support via donation, or subscribe to nuBridge. Your future gizmos will thank you.

The post Nukepedia 2.0: From Geekfest to Gigabytes first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.