NCIS: Sydney S3

The season's most involved sequence is set at a polar research base in Antarctica on the eve of Polar Night. With the production based in Sydney we mixed a partial set build with a CG environment. The interior set build was anchored by a distinctive six-sided window that one of the characters look through to the Antarctic landscape. The production designer supplied us with a low-detail concept model of the exterior that fit the vision of the partial set build. The design was two octagonal structures joined by a bridge and lifted off the ground on concrete columns.

From the concept we built the hero CG asset. The roof was dressed out with satellite dishes, storage tanks, fences and walkways, antennas and aerials, then weathered under layered ice and partially melted snow so the base read as though it had just come through a storm. The ground beneath became deep, trodden snow scored with footprints and vehicle tracks, rocky terrain breaking through and shipping containers stacked around the structure. We modeled and surfaced icicles that hang from the eaves, a communications tower sits in the background, and a flat sheet of ice reads as the landing strip out front. A key part of achieving the look was using Substance to create a convincing snow material that we used for the landscape.

Our hero shot flies the camera in low over that airstrip and rises to meet the six-sided window, where a character stands looking out. The entire shot is CG but for the live-action plate of that character, which we placed on a card inside the base, behind the window. As the camera climbs toward the glass it reveals more of the interior, so the plate needed parallax and perspective correction to hold up under the move, along with subtle reflections of the surrounding environment worked into the window. For the reverse interior angles looking out to the environment, we supplied a digital matte painting of the Antarctic terrain beyond the glass.

/ Arrival

The aircraft that arrives in Antarctica is a fully CG four-engine passenger plane, based on the real aircraft that we used on location at an airport, which we photographed for textures and reference. We started with a stock model of a similar aircraft and adjusted the model in Maya to fit the unique details of the aircraft used during the shoot.

We rigged and animated the aircraft in Maya, surfaced in Substance, lit in Houdini and used Redshift for rendering. As the aircraft touches down the landing gear is under load, the suspension needed to react to the weight of the aircraft hitting the runway. We used a Houdini simulation to kick up a puff of snow and ice off the wheels, and we added a light snow and mist pass over the whole shot to carry the weather. We added marker flags down the airstrip and used a stock image for the sky and distant Antarctic details.

We shot plates of the cast disembarking the aircraft at a Sydney airport. We rotoscoped the actors clear of the airport, and composited them into our CG Antarctic environment. We replaced the bitumen underfoot with snow and ice, regraded the sky to the overcast polar palette and placed the control tower and base behind them to sell the location.

Deeper in the episode, a fire-cleansing event goes off inside a glass-walled room. It was not practical to do this fire effect with SFX, so we used a lighting effect on set which gave the actors something to react to. We rotoscoped and keyed the two leads off the plate and layered live-action fireball elements in behind the glass. For the fireball, we used elements from our library. Our library is substantial, with around 30TB of highly tagged fire, smoke, water and atmospheric elements built up across years of production. Fire work is something we've developed a deep pipeline for. See our breakdowns on La Brea S3 and Fires.

We used the same CG passenger jet for this sequence as it flies through the clouds during Polar Night. The director wanted a distinct look for this sequence, which we graded mauve, pink and purple to help with the read of the Polar Night look. The clouds are a hybrid build. We used library cloud elements in the deep background and also clouds on cards in the midground and combined this with Houdini FX renders for some of the cloud mist that blows quickly by the camera.

The season opens with a blast. A bomb detonates on the far side of a doorway in a metallic submarine tunnel, throwing Mackey off her feet. We sent a member of our team to scan the set. Our on-set VFX supervisor captured LIDAR along with chrome balls and lighting reference photography. The heavy red practical lighting needed to be reproduced in our digital lighting setup so our FX simulation would integrate with the on-set effects blast. Special effects did as much of the practical explosion as they safely could, and we built on top of it.

The blast was achieved with multiple Houdini simulations brought together in Nuke: a hero pass of puffy smoke, a secondary debris pass blown through the tunnel, and a set of finer, tendrilly streaks running down the corridor walls. The tendril streaks were a deliberate choice, which helped make sense of how the pressure wave moved through the space. We rotoscoped Mackey to bed her into the effect.

A scene at a rural location called for two extensions. The first set extension added a second level to an existing barn, a rusty corrugated-iron storey with glass windows and horizontal ventilation slats, dressed with Tibetan prayer flags strung from the upper level to match the work done on set. The goal was to enlarge the space and tie it to an interior meant to play as the same building.

The second set extension was a full CG building surrounded by trees at the same location. The hero shot sat at around half screen height and lived behind several layers of vegetation, which made for a tricky composite. We dressed the surrounding area as a working rural structure rather than just a clean model dropped into the trees. We added water tanks, shovels, piles of dirt and adjusted the landscape around the building to bed it into the environment.

A military squad moves through an Afghan village under night vision. Editorial sourced real night-vision footage of actors walking through empty terrain, and the brief was an environment augmentation: we built the village around the squad and laid graphics over the top. The sequence is framed as if shot from a satellite, and it climaxes in an explosion that engulfs the squad. We simulated the fireball in EmberGen, rendered it in Blender and composited in Nuke, the blast blooming out and wrapping around the figures on the ground before we cut to a wide shot to read it from distance. The wide shot is a full CG shot built to pass as surveillance footage, using a mix of an EmberGen explosion rendered in Blender with smoke elements from our library, all composited in Nuke.

The scorpion began as a stock CG model that needed some surfacing work to ensure it held up at 4k. We rigged and animated the scorpion in Maya, surfaced in Substance, lit and rendered in Houdini and composited in Nuke. Scorpion locomotion has a very specific character, so we studied some YouTube references closely and made sure the gravel under each leg shifted as the creature moved.

We also had to produce an approaching sandstorm, which came in the form of a small-scale willy willy spinning in the desert. We built the cyclone effect in EmberGen, exported the cache to Houdini for lighting and rendering and finished the shots by compositing in Nuke.

Later, a character looks out of an aircraft window and sees lights in the sky. We were given some creative latitude, this was meant to be a pseudo sci-fi event. We leaned into the X-Files vibe by adding stars and the sci-fi formation lights which were animated in Nuke, inspired by UFO footage.

This is not an ordinary mosquito. In the story it carries an implanted chip and is flown like a drone by a team of scientists controlling its flight path. We started from a stock mosquito, rigged and animated it in Maya, surfaced it in Substance, lit in Houdini, rendered in Redshift and composited in Nuke. The shots are macro, which put a premium on the lighting: the insect was lit carefully on set so we could match those conditions in our Houdini scene and hold the illusion at that focal length.

Some of the season's work is meant to go unnoticed. When an aggressor smashes the driver's-side window of the hero's car, the glass wasn't there on the day. We shot the plate clean and added a Houdini FX simulation of the window shattering and falling away.

A bowling alley delivered another. Production shot a green-screen element of a real spinning bowling ball, so rather than build a CG one we keyed that element and animated it through the shot in 2D, carrying it through camera and into the pins, with the reflections off the glossy lane carefully considered and the pin strike layered in separately.

A third came when a chemical can is sprayed into a villain's face. The practical didn't carry the velocity the moment needed, so we kept what was shot and drove it with a more powerful Houdini liquid simulation, rendered in Redshift and composited in Nuke.

Stock fireworks elements were keyed and composited into Sydney Harbour, set behind the Bridge and across Chinatown. We tracked the cameras in Nuke and rotoscoped any foreground objects so they sat correctly in front of the bursts.

For the daytime house explosion, a SFX explosion was shot practically at high speed. We added a shock wave across the front of the blast, then rotoscoped and keyed characters in front of it to bring them closer to the danger than the live action allowed.

We also needed a car explosion at night, where the rear boot lid blasts off and takes a character to the ground. We scanned and photographed the vehicle and the boot lid, and the car was rigged to explode on the day with the boot lid removed. We added the CG boot lid and animated it tearing off and flying, then integrated the actor as a separate green-screen pass so we could place him closer to the blast than the stunt safety envelope allowed. Two stunt performers were shot on a further pass and composited into the heart of the fireball, completing the impression of bodies caught in the explosion.