Freefolk recently served as a lead vendor on the long-awaited Netflix series KAOS, starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, a dark but humorous contemporary spin on Greek mythology.VFX supervisor Steve Murgatroyd, CG supervisor Harin Hirani, VFX executive producer Meg Guidon, and VFX producer Hannah Dakin and VFX coordinator Regan Perry led the Freefolk team that created a stunning fully CG Mount Olympus, the series opening shot, and home of Zeus. In addition to the mountain and Zeus palace, the team completed the surrounding environment, building the cloudscape, atmospheric fog elements, and distant clouds.Being tasked with not only the first shot of the series but also establishing Zeus decadent dwelling, was incredibly exciting and challenging, said Murgatroyd. It needed to be both breathtaking and believable as well as feel immense, lavish, rich and beautiful.Murgatroyd explained that the mountains surface was hand sculpted, based on references, with additional rocks and stones layered on top, he continued, Each and every tree, plant and bush scattered on the mountain was carefully considered, mixing up rich and vibrant greens of Cyprus trees with pockets of warm pink from the wisteria that decorate the walls of the gardens and mansion. In addition, the team built set dressing assets, such as fountains, statues and garden furniture, where all of these small details were key in making it feel like a real living place.For the team to execute the dramatic thunderstorms orchestrated by the king of gods, the VFX team controlled the composition of the clouds as well as the speed at which they developed.We generated several cloud simulations in Houdini starting from birth to over 3000 frames, these were then randomly rotated, scaled, offset and pieced together to create the larger storm structure, shared Hirani. We were then able to retime these caches on a per shot basis to get the speed we wanted. Other cloud layers were done procedurally like the distant ones and the surrounding base clouds the storm sat on.He continued, One of the particular challenges for this sequence was storms are usually seen from below, at ground level, where they appear dark as they are dense and block the light but in this sequence, we are looking at the storm from above. To tell the story we had to creatively darken the shadows of the clouds in compositing to make them appear dense and stormy and show their progression.Check out Freefolks VFX magic:Other key work included creating the Frame on the river Lethe, and the increasing amount of people who passed through on their way to renewal, Prometheus Cliff, a huge concert stadium with crowd replication, Heras collection of Tacitas tongues, a CG gold statue of Zeus and lavish flora and fauna as well as numerous other crucial VFX.KAOS is now streaming on Netflix.Source: Freefolk Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.