The Wheel of Time S2

Project Overview

“Outpost’s work on season 2 of Wheel of Time was varied, ranging from vast environment work to intricate detailing of certain types of magic within the show,” Outpost VFX Supervisor Oliver Winwood explains.

“Our work on season 1 provided us with a great jumping off point, and having the team who worked on the initial Tar Valon build meant we had a really thorough understanding of the asset, which helped us in creating an updated version for this season.”

Following on from a climactic season 1, The Wheel of Time season 2 sees the struggle between Light and Dark continue as we witness the fallout from Rand’s encounter with the Dark One and learn more about the Seanchan army.

Once again, worldbuilding played an integral role to the story for this season as we revisit the full-CG environment of Tar Valon, this time in more detail, and return to the Two Rivers.

Outpost CG Supervisor Ben Hart-Shea and CG Generalist Nick White, both integral to the initial build of Tar Valon and the White Tower, were on hand again this season to bring another level of detail into the city.

“When we first approached the Tar Valon build for season 1, we built it in Maya which was a very manual process,” White explains.

“This time, we built the city in Houdini which allowed us to work more procedurally, giving us more time to make creative decisions about design and cameras.”

Using their work on Tar Valon in season 1 as a guide, White and Hart-Shea began working on adding more depth into the city, working from the big elements to the small: “We knew where the White Tower was going to be, so then we added our hero buildings,” White recalls.

“We added much more detail to the hero building models,” Hart-Shea adds. “Then once we have the buildings and the roads, we started to think about where we might want more open areas like parks and built the city as we imagined it would have been built by the Ogiers.”

The team were also responsible for the look and behaviour of Min’s vision, as well as the wolves’ vision. “The more complex vision was the wolf vision,” states Winwood. “While Min can see the future, the wolves see either something that is happening in parallel, or quite often something that has happened in the past.

“The first thing that we wanted to do was differentiate between Min’s vision and the wolf vision, so we came up with an initial look that was almost like a sonic pulse for the wolves,” Winwood continues.

Another element that the team returned to for season 2 was the melting of another Great Serpent ring worn by the Aes Sedai and their upper class of students. “After Nynaeve goes into the arches and it is believed that she has been lost, Liandrin takes the ring to drop it into the molten gold in the White Tower to destroy it,” details Winwood. “This was similar to a sequence the team did for season 1, but the shots were slightly different, the angles were different and there was a little bit of a redesign of the flow of the gold that she drops the ring into, making it a little less golden and more like molten metal.”

Watch the team’s work on The Wheel of Time season 2, available to stream on Prime Video today.