Defiance

Creating Defiance VFX with Lightwave

In a darkened studio on the Universal lot, a small, tight knit group of CG artists created 1,100 visual effects scenes—including 3D creatures, exotic flora, and virtual environments—for the first season of the Syfy series Defiance.

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Defiance

If you factor in all the 2D effects—like glowing weapons and muzzle flashes and the routine cleanup and fixes customary of sci-fi CG effects—the workload swells to 1,500 effects. And this volume doesn’t reflect the many iterations and modifications they made to the 3D creatures and visual effects following reviews.

With their finely honed LightWave skills, the CG artists joke that they’re like Jedi Knights practicing an obscure religion and wielding 3D tools with mysterious powers. Using LightWave 3D, these CG artists moved virtual heaven and earth to create the new world of Defiance.

“The visual effects challenge on Defiance is to transport viewers to an imaginary, hybrid place that juxtaposes life on Earth with a strange, bizarre new world,” said Gary Hutzel, visual effects supervisor for Defiance, which aired Monday nights on the Syfy Network, a part of the NBCUniversal group in Los Angeles. “To successfully immerse viewers in Defiance, our virtual environments needed to support the imaginative plot by strategically employing extremely credible effects.”

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From Alien Creatures to Hellbugs

Since Defiance is essentially located overtop of what was once St. Louis, Mo. the cityscape is dotted with recognizable St. Louis skyscrapers and other vestiges of modern life. But the Defiance locale also has an infusion of Votanis alien cultures and technology. Viewers quickly become acquainted with the many mutant life forms—such as sabre wolves and Hellbugs—that spawned after disgruntled Votans deliberately detonated their advanced Ark Sphere weapons on Earth, which drastically altered Earth’s biosphere.

Could the CG team have created all these visual effects without LightWave? “Absolutely not,” said Defiance CG Artist Sean Jackson. And Defiance CG Artist Jesse Toves adds that without LightWave tools like Instancing on many scenes, “We would’ve been dealing with hundreds of millions of polygons. It would’ve been a nightmare.”

In creating cinema-quality visual effects on a TV show budget and production schedule, both Toves and Jackson cite several LightWave capabilities that made all the difference in their productivity. LightWave’s intuitive Modeler enabled the animators to quickly rig 3D hero creatures from scratch.

“Whenever a creature needed to do something specific, like climb up the side of a rocky cliff or get shot and fall over, we animated it by hand,” said Toves. “But if we needed an army of robotic Volge mercenaries marching over a bridge or 50 of them running through a valley—where their numbers mattered more than the specific performance—we would use Instancing to achieve that effect.”

Building Virtual Environments

Defiance depends heavily on virtual environments and beauty shots to convey the size of the town and its geographic surroundings. When the production wasn’t shooting right on the back lot, the actors and crew worked in large green screen studios. Since it was difficult for the actors to know how to react to creatures or other threats that weren’t physically there, detailed animated sequences were provided to the director and actors so they could pre-visualize the CG elements that would eventually be added to the scene. For the attack of the Volge, a group of actors were standing on a rocky mound in the middle of a green screen studio. Pre-viz elements helped them understand how to react and where to fire their weapons.

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