Highest Rated Comments


Barnstorm_VFX44 karma

Our visual bible for Germania was a book called "Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942". There were extensive and detailed plans for the transformation of Berlin, including blueprints for buildings like the Volkshalle. We did take some creative liberties with the arrangement and positionings of buildings for the sake of the narrative and to better coordinate with the production designer's aesthetic of the sets. We looked at old film reels including the famous "Triumph of the Will" for references of how Nazi rallies were organized. One video game that I remember paying attention to was "Wolfenstein: The New Order" because it presents a world that was taken over by the Nazis, though its presentation of post war Berlin (including the Volkshalle) was much more futuristic and sci-fi-ish that what we went for. Our goal in MITHC was to create a sense of the world that felt fairly mundane and grounded in reality. The more it felt like something that could really happen, the more effective the message of the show.

Barnstorm_VFX31 karma

Some of the stuff in season 2 was re-used from season 1, though in most cases because it was used differently, we rebuilt portions of the models and completely re-textured them.

New elements for season two include Germania (the city-within-a-city in Berlin where the seat of Nazi power was located) and specifically the Volkshalle. We built that from the ground up utilizing lots of references and in-depth creative discussion with the show.

Germania was an ENORMOUS build that involved many artists, many custom created buildings and textured, and over a HUNDRED BILLION polygons. It was much bigger than anything we'd ever made before and took something like 5 hours to render a single render frame on a 128 core machine. And that's just the outside. The inside of the Volkshalle was its own beast. It was of course huge (1000 feet tall in real life measurement) and was very difficult to light because most of the lighting during the daytime was supposed to come in through a single oculus at the top of the structure (this is very difficult to do in 3D because of the indirect lighting bounces). For the last episode, we had to also add 100,000 digital Nazis to the scene. That was another huge issue to deal with. We're really proud of all the work we did to put it together.

Barnstorm_VFX29 karma

Yes we do. We also TRY to maintain a sensible work week and avoid crunch (though understandably there was a decent amount of crunching as High Castle was coming to a close). We have a very high proportion of full time artists (80% full time compared to 20% contract artists) that get overtime as well as little perks like their laundry done every week. Its actually appalling to me that anyone can get away with NOT paying overtime because, at least in California where we are based, it would be against labor laws to not do it.

Barnstorm_VFX26 karma

We've experimented with a variety of programs over the years, but for 3D work, we settled on using the open-source program Blender starting about 3 years ago. Its very unusual for vfx houses (at least in the US) to use Blender (as opposed to, say, Maya), but there are a number of great features that caused us to switch over to it. Blender has renderer called "Cycles" that we've used for our rendering of most of the 3D elements in High Castle and other shows. In order to deal with the huge rendering needs of High Castle, we set up cloud rendering using Amazon's own AWS servers through Deadline, which allowed us to have as many as 150 machines working at a time to render some of the big sequences.

In addition to Blender, we occasionally use other 3D programs, including Houdini for particle systems, fire, etc. Our texturing and material work is done in Substance Painter, and compositing is done in Nuke and After Effects.

Barnstorm_VFX23 karma

Yes, that was us. If you want to see a breakdown, you can email [email protected] and get a link