Foundation S3

Project Overview

Outpost VFX returned to the world of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation for its climactic third season, once again tackling complex character work for the robot character Demerzel as well as creating a brand-new digital character for the show and a host of sci-fi environment builds.

“It's been great to come back to Foundation, honestly. It’s a great series, I really like it, and the universe and the quality of the effects that they want on this show is top notch,” begins Outpost VFX Supervisor, Mathieu Assemat. “Every season, the work we get is more challenging, which is pretty cool. We had a lot of environment work this time around which we haven't done so much in the previous seasons apart from water environments like Synnax and the Maiden moon, but no cities like this time.”

The environment in question is Mycogen, the district of Trantor home to a robot-worshipping movement called The Inheritance. The Outpost team was called upon to build a number of full-CG establishers that set the scene for Brother Day’s travails into the sector.

“When we talked to Chris MacLean, the client-side VFX Supervisor, he had some really clear reference of what he wanted it to be, which was a mix between something pretty organic and at the same time something really technological,” says Assemat. “We started just by working with cubes and simple geometries just to get the layouts that we liked so we could work on the camera.

“After that we could work with everything like little Lego pieces. The environment artists on this had a lot of fun because they had all the pieces and then they could build the city out however they wanted and then have some fun adding details. It meant that they could add their own ideas and then in dailies people were looking at it and saying, ‘oh, maybe we could do this or that’. People got excited about the shots, which was cool to see.”

Following on from Outpost’s work on the first two seasons of Foundation, a large portion of the work in season three involved the robot character Demerzel. In this season, as well as having to show her repairing herself and also transitioning from human skin to her robot substructure, the team was tasked with the dramatic sequence in which she is melted by the same beam of energy normally used to euthanise Cleon’s clones.

“The first thing was sitting down and working this sequence out with Chris and the client-side team,” explains Assemat. “What happens in every shot? It was a lot of back and forth and it was always ‘maybe, the fire could look like this and the body could melt here. But if we do that, we have an issue over here’ and until the end, we had to tweak and offset things from shot to shot a little bit because we couldn't read what was going on.

“It was a really iterative process. We submitted the first version to the client, but it was really missing something. From a technical standpoint, we were getting there. What we didn’t have was enough emotion in the digital Demerzel’s performance, so right at the end we took a big step back and we added the glinting eyes and all that stuff, just to try to add more.

“That's when Chris had the idea to have morse code in Demerzel’s eyes, which is a really cool moment that some viewers might have missed but Reddit figured out pretty quickly.”

“On the big shot at the end we had maybe six or seven fire elements to blend. We had different skeleton elements burning at different temperatures. We also had a really burnt Demerzel, which was a shader one of the lighting artists came up with and he came to me and said, ‘maybe I pushed it a little bit too far’. We nicknamed this layer the ‘Air Fryer Demerzel’ because it was like when you put chicken in the air fryer!”

The final shot of the series reveals Kalle talking to a new robot character that was introduced just for this final moment – the Asterion. Alongside the client-side team and showrunners, Outpost concepted this character and then built and animated a CG version to appear in the shot. The camera then moves through the window, across a CG moon environment to reveal what appears to be Earth in the series’ final frames.

“We had a basic knowledge of what the Asterion would be – it's meant to be like a male version of Demerzel with a slightly less advanced technology. So that’s what we went for as an initial pass and we did quite a few iterations in concept,” highlights Assemat.

“We spent some time working on the head shape, as well as iterating a lot around the look of the eyes, etc. I would say that the basic shapes of the Asterion and the basic patterns are similar to the skeleton we built for Demerzel, and there is a lot of common language. We then added additional layers and elements that made the Asterion feel a bit cruder than Demerzel. We treated it like version one of the Demerzel technology, so it's not as refined. The character only appeared in one shot, but a lot of work went into its design.”

Overall, Outpost delivered over 230 shots for season three of Foundation.