NBCUniversal / Emerald City

A variety of disciplines were employed, from concept design, pre-viz, sculpting, simulations, character animation to a novel procedural environment technique developed in-house.

The city itself is a complete CG environment, designed and built to replicate an ancient coastal city centred by the iconic Wizard’s castle and guarded by a series of colossal stone giants at the city entrance. The method used in the approach to the build of a full 3D city allowed the production to revisit the city, a character itself, many times throughout the season. A procedural environment built using Freefolk’s in-house tools efficiently setup large areas of detailed cityscape. The traditional approach would be to produce specific matte paintings to order, in building the city asset the landscape was provided before shot production started.

The team utilised proprietary volume tools enabled specific art-direction of the weather system forming the super tornado built using a dynamic rig and simulation system.