Tim Key in a bee swarm suit in The Witchfinder

A Bee Swarm Suit

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…

It Never Rains but it Pours

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…

Delusions of Demons – CG flame effects and fluid simulations.

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…

Delusions of cockroaches – creating CG bugs.

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…

The Pale Horse

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…

Stand out from the crowd

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…

Building Bridges

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…

A Forest of Points

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…

Beardy Weirdy

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…

Wigs You Don’t Have to Rent

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…

The Sound of Water

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…

Lost at Sea

 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…

Ice and Lasers

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…