Is a plate within a plate that can make more plates a MetaPlate? Who knows, but that’s the name of this test. What’s the Objective? With the rise of Virtual Production, notably LED volumes and a shortage of familiar artists with real-time engine experience, we’ve seen plate material doing a lot of work in these…
Lexhag VFX used Houdini to create CG simulations to completely cover lead actor, Tim Key, in a swarm of bees for Baby Cow’s six-part comedy series, The Witchfinder. The series, which aired on BBC Two in February, follows a failing Witchfinder Tim Key as he takes a suspected Witch played by Daisy Donnelly across 1640s…
Across three months, we designed, set up and shot LED Volume days with our partners October Studios & 80Six. Our first shoot focused on creating in-vehicle driving sequences, our second shoot placed people in different environments for a US-based documentary series. In this article, we walk through our process for in-vehicle driving scenes. Roads…? Where…
Particle simulation was just one of the visual effects we created for ITV’s Too Close. Snowed-In Productions commissioned us for their new three-part psychological thriller, which aired in April 2021. Lexhag VFX Supervisor Jonathan Hancock and the team worked as lead VFX vendor on the show delivering pre-vis, on-set supervision, complex particle simulations and creature sequences…
A scary CG demon face was just one of the visual effects we created for ITV’s Too Close. Snowed-In Productions commissioned us for their new three-part psychological thriller, which aired in April 2021. Lexhag VFX Supervisor Jonathan Hancock and the team worked as lead VFX vendor on the show delivering pre-vis, on-set supervision, complex particle simulations…
CG bugs are just one of the effects we created for Too Close, ITV’s three-part psychological drama. It’s a story of Connie (Denise Gough), a young mother struggling with psychosis and her relationship with Dr Robertson (Emily Watson) a psychotherapist in crisis, tasked with assessing the high-profile client dubbed ‘The Yummy Mummy Monster’. The scope…
We produced a sequence of shots for the stylish six-part cat and mouse thriller, We Hunt Together from our Visual Effects studio in London. For example, the severed head in Episode 1, as well as providing on-set VFX Supervision for some of the bigger elements in the series. In the first episode, we see Baba,…
Getting back into production is an exciting prospect, but you might be wondering how to make your scenes look old-normal in the new-normal? How do you convey energy, movement and life that comes from people being close together, be that a small setting in a restaurant or a large crowd scene? What looked like some…
The Pale Horse is a two part Agatha Christie drama set in the 60’s for the BBC, adapted by Sarah Phelps. We’ve worked closely with Mammoth Screen to produce over 130 VFX shots, from simple removal of modern TV aerials and sky replacements, to more complex fire simulations and set extensions. Getting involved from an…
If you need crowds of people to fill a scene, one way to achieve this is to get hundreds of supporting actors in place. The cost of this can add up of course, particularly if they require complex costumes. We needed to create a crowd of approximately 6000 people for the hanging scene in Poldark…
What we do uniquely at Lexhag is think about our creative challenges with all the tools available to us, which includes SFX and practical techniques. To illustrate this we decided to make a workflow piece to show how a shot can be designed from the start to end using a range of techniques in both…
A typical project for us consists of many exciting challenges. If you read our other posts, you’ve probably realised that we’re not just VFX people. We have knowledge and skills in all aspects of getting that shot and Jericho was no different. We had a vast range of different challenges that you’ll have an insight…
So why the Oscar win? Considering the category nominees; Avengers, Christopher Robin, Star Wars and Ready Player One, it was a controversial win, no doubt. It’s likely that each of the nominations had well over 1500 VFX shots, several being full CG. Compared to maybe only half of that in First Man. Maybe it wasn’t…
Tree scanning and Environment build for a VR installation, 134 Million Points and Counting What We Did We scanned processed and created assets for a VR installation experience, where everything was displayed as manipulated points rather than geometry. The environment is a large Sequoia Tree in a forest of rocks, ferns and smaller trees. We…
Hair and Beard Grooming with XGen and Arnold What We Did We did a full beard groom in Maya using Xgen splines and rendered it out using the new Standard Hair shader in Arnold 5. Standard Hair is a physically based shader to render hair and fur, based on the d’Eon model for specular and…
When we needed to capture hair at a macro level we tested an old trick but a good one; the practical route. For more about our digital hair work for the same project, check out this post. The world of FX requires a ton of testing. This is where silly ideas become great ideas, it’s…
Hair Primitive Projection Using Maya 2018 (XGen) and Fusion Studio 9 What We Did Using a single frame from the plate, we created a simple groom, before decimating the hair count and using these to drive the animation of primitives with camera facing normals. We then used Fusion to project the plate back onto the…
What We Did We took 10 seconds of a song that had a good repetitive beat, and used it to drive a realistic simulation of an ocean surface. We wanted it to behave naturally, whilst subtly carrying the rhythm of the music. We used MASH to create float (no pun intended) values, that were used…
Working with Brownian Motion we’ve helped them develop their multicamera arrays using compositing tools. One might not immediately think of using vanilla NukeX when it comes to the stitching of video footage, but NukeX, with its built-in 3D system, provided a complete toolset for the things we set out to accomplish in our collaboration with Brownian…
The Alternative Cabinet War Rooms Over the course of 7 days, we joined forces with Subterranea Britannica and FARO to scan and photograph the Paddock Bunker, Churchill’s alternative war rooms. The result is a LiDAR scan of all 50 rooms across two levels, set below a housing estate in North London. The Bunker is full of history,…
The power of Houdini. SideFX kindly provided trial software for our team to get their heads into Houdini and this is the result. Modeling the Boat The first step was to model a Tall Ship using reference of the ship we wanted to create. We kept the shape and silhouette as simplified as possible…
CGI isn’t always the answer Working together with Asylum SFX, Lexhag developed a computer controlled pneumatic suit for the Netflix show The Innocents. Universally made to fit all the different actors’ shapes and sizes, the under jacket contained all the major muscle groups, which could be individually inflated and deflated to give the illusion that the actor’s body…
Shooting interior vehicle shots can easily turn into a big number, creeping over you like Freddy does, while you sleep. Traditionally, they can be shot for real, on a low loader or with a specially modified vehicle. You can also shoot them in a nice warm studio, which is what we were tasked to do….
Quick, easy and high spec. That was our brief for the Witness system we built. For our recent New Pictures and Netflix production, The Innocents, we needed to build something that we could employ quickly, wouldn’t be intrusive onset and met a particular price point. Capturing multiple angles, performances or moving objects enables a smoother match-moving…
A quick one for the records; working upon the recommendation of our friends at Peanut VFX we created some vac formed faceplates for the quick application of tracking markers for a recent project. The process involved taking face casts of each actor, from which plaster positives were made. The plaster was cleaned up and the marker holes…
Iceland is a cool place. Quite literally, it’s a beautiful, harsh, unique place on earth where, it seems, no much lives. We travelled there in search of a mythical Ice Cave in which an artist, Isaac Julien, would make his next works. What did we do? Our key job was to add a giant, wooden, staircase…
When you can’t find a 1940’s London Street scene that’s been demolished because of the bad things that happen, you build one in a BBC carpark in Glasgow. That’s what Pat Campbell’s team did for Rillington Place. Lexhag worked closely with Pat’s team to make a giant PBU (Photo Blow Up) with a twist. Traditionally the art department…