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www.postmagazine.com 26 POST APRIL 2018 Dark, a German sci-fi thriller series, debuted on Netflix's streaming service last December. It spans six decades with storylines set in 1953, 1986 and 2019 in the fictional German town of Winden. Missing children, family secrets and the discovery of a wormhole in the cave system beneath the local nuclear power plant reveal some very dark mysteries indeed in this first German-language Netflix original series. Berlin-based Rise Visual Effects Studios (www. risefx.com) provided all the VFX shots for Season 1 of the series. VFX supervisor Sven Pannicke was responsible for planning the visual effects, including design and VFX set supervision during principal photography. The "apparatus" time-travel machine was one of the challenges Pannicke faced on the show. "On set, we wanted to use a practical model, built and provided by the art department," he explains. "We had to figure out how far we could go with the practical model in terms of function- ality. We added all the moving parts to the model as CG elements — all the turning wheels, gears and cylinders. To make life a bit easier for us, I decided to make a digital copy of the complete practical model using our 3D Lidar scanning workflow. So if the apparatus needed to come to life in a shot, we could replace the whole appa- ratus with our CG model. This was easier than enhancing just parts of it." Since there were two practical models of the apparatus, to illustrate different time periods and different stages of development, Rise created two different versions of the CG model as well. In addition to the apparatus, Rise crafted envi- ronments and handled effects animation for the wormhole, or portal. In-camera techniques and DI color correction signal shifts in the timeline. Pannicke considers the nuclear power plant to be his personal highlight in Season 1. "Everybody looks for typical VFX shots like time shift effects, but they don't expect to see a full CG power plant in the background," he explains. "The main entry of the nuclear power plant in the series was shot at the back entry to Berlin's Olympiastadion — not even all of our Berlin friends noticed that!" The location was chosen as the most appropriate venue for the shot in the Berlin area and because 1 finale, which had 45 full-CG shots, was one of the biggest episodes we've done for any client." FuseFX worked with The Tick creator Ben Edlund and show EPs David Fury and Barry Josephson on design and concept early on; the company also worked with the editorial team on previs to help shape the storytelling. VLM was initially envisioned as an actor whose live-action plates would be integrated into massive CG environments created by FuseFX. When the producers determined they couldn't capture the dy- namic shots needed in the allotted time, they tasked FuseFX with the challenge of creating a digital VLM. The VLM appeared in full body mode and as five additional assets: Toe, foot, foot and leg, butt and back, and head and shoulders. After the actor hired for VLM was scanned, FuseFX went to work adding realistic details to the digital body, such as nose hairs, wrinkles, perspira- tion, beard follicles and toenails, to support the tight shots. "We did a lot of hand sculpting and texturing to bring fidelity to the character," says Wanstreet. "The base scan was 10 times less detailed than what we ended up with. We looked at the photography from the scanning session and extrapolated all the detail. We even took reference footage of our own gritty feet." Artists used ZBrush for sculpting and The Foundry's Mari for texturing. FuseFX was required to build environments to two different scales for the VLM and The Tick, although both roles were played by six-foot-tall men. "We scaled environments up and down with different render passes, a terribly complicated en- deavor" that involved using Chaos Group's V-Ray, says Wanstreet. Itoo Software's Forest Pack scattering tool for 3ds Max proved invaluable for scaling all types of foliage. FuseFX worked on digital doubles for The Tick and Arthur for the entire season, adding details "every chance we got," including facial rigs that they didn't have at the beginning of the series. By the end of Season 1, "full facial rigs allowed the digidou- bles to emote and talk," Wanstreet says. The CG T-Ship, hidden in the letterform of a huge sign until The Tick breaks it out and flies off in it, was matched to set pieces and enhanced with additional detail. The purple energy explo- sion around the VLM was accomplished with "major non-sim VDBs" using Houdini, an idea from one of FuseFX's artists. "We had never done it before," says Wanstreet. "The hand-keyed techniques and hand-animated shapes look like a simulated cloud but allowed us to get complex, multiple iterations in the time allotted." Wanstreet says that the last three episodes proved the value of FuseFX's AWS cloud render- ing pipeline. "One night we submitted hundreds of render passes and 1,400 nodes, and the cloud turned them around overnight," he notes. "Instead of buying our own render farm infrastructure that would soon be out of date, the cloud gave us scalability, access to the best, heavy-duty ma- chines and a huge savings in cost and speed." DARK Netflix's Dark and VFX supervisor Sven Pannicke (right).