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DUNE www.postmagazine.com 33 POST JAN/FEB 2022 movie from the '80s was on everyone's mind be- cause it's what everyone remembers, but it wasn't looked at [on our end] or copied; we stayed away from it. Rather, we went back to the original idea of determining what these creatures were and how they could move through sand. The look [for Dune 2021] was then devised from that." Despite the visual association of the giant worms with the Dune tome, in Villeneuve's Dune thus far, their appearance is understated and limited (the movie covers only about half of the book, and most of the worm action takes place in the second half of the book). Therefore, audiences are given a slow introduction to these iconic monsters. "The way Denis played it was a bit like Jaws, wherein you only see hints of it throughout the movie until one interacts with Paul at the end," says Lambert. Like in the book, the worms have baleen-like teeth from the mythology of them sifting food through their teeth, similar to how whales sift through water to catch krill. Based on that, the animators began to explore the director's thoughts on how the sandworms — which are in the range of 200 meters long — would move through the sand. They also had to determine how the monsters would actually displace the sand as they moved through it — which resulted in approximately a year of R&D at Dneg. Lambert knew from the start that this would be one of the biggest visual effects challenges. Initially the team at Dneg looked at a range of behaviors, including a truck plowing through a huge section of sand. Following further animation studies of snakes and worms navigating through dirt and sand, the group found that the action was not really a struggle for them, but, again, more akin to a whale moving through water. And that soon became the inspiration behind the sandworms' motion. "Because the sand was so fin , the simulations felt more like rippling water as it was moving, and every now and then, it would become more violent and burst through the surface, just like a great big splash," Lambert describes. The Dneg sand simulations were extremely large — terabytes in size. The simulations themselves were Houdini-based, crafted using a number of tools scripted in-house. "I was getting emails throughout the process saying the storage space was running low. I don't know the exact number, but we defini ely ended up using petabytes across the show, between the explosions and the sand simulations," Myles notes. "That was the most I ever used on a show, and I think the most ever used at Dneg." To save valuable processing time, the group needed a way to show how the sand was likely to move, without doing a full-on simulation, which can take days for some of the larger sims to pro- cess. So, they created a system called 'ultra res', which enabled them to show different versions of the simulation, using 'sand' particles gradually decreasing in size, to get a feel for the motion, starting with particles roughly the size of bowling balls, then the size of tennis balls and golf balls, and eventually the ultra-res version, which was the smooth, sand grain size. Scale played an important role in the displacement. "The sand grain size really defines the si e of this creature, too, because if the grains are too large, then the worm suddenly starts to look a bit small," says Myles. What's more, the simulation had to drive the ensuing dust clouds and other sims for the sand dunes that are farther out from the path of the worm, as it was not just the immediate area around the worm that was affected by the sandworm's vibrations. There are little shifting sands that fall down from a mound or rock formation, no matter how large or small it is, that had to be worked into the overall simulation. More Sand and Storm Sand was an omni-present character of sorts in Dune. It surrounds and affects the way of life for creatures great and small. "When the Atreides are 'given' control of Arrakis from the emperor, they arrive with all the pomp and circumstance befitting a rulin More than 1,700 VFX shots were created, with Dneg serving as the lead vendor.