Desert ship VFX

Set in open desert, this sequence places a computer-generated ship into sand-swept terrain, with lighting, dust and atmospherics carried across from the plate. It brings together three strands of the studio’s work at once — CG asset build, environment integration and compositing — in a single continuous piece of imagery.

Open desert offers a CG object no help at all. Nothing clutters the frame, the sun acts as a single hard key with an enormous sky bouncing fill back up from below, and the eye goes straight to the shadow. The hull has to sit at a believable scale, which is a question of how quickly haze eats its contrast at distance and how the ground gives way where it meets the sand. The surface needs the wear a real object accumulates — pitting, scoured paint, dust drifting into every recess — because a clean render reads as a model. Sand does the rest of the storytelling: particulate lifted by movement, drifts settling around the form, air distortion in the heat. Building assets that hold up under that kind of exposure is exactly the sort of shot Terminal FX takes on.