Making the VFX for Netflix's Atlas

Brad Peyton's Atlas starring Jennifer Lopez has made a big impact on Netflix, and part of that is thanks to the epic VFX from MPC. The visual effects company has just released its VFX breakdown reel for the sci-fi movie, and it's provided insights into how it created some of the most complex sequences.

Some 825 artists delivered 266 shots covering a wide variety of work. Led by Production VFX Supervisor Lindy DeQuattro and VFX Producer Blondel Aidoo, MPC’s team created full CG environments, set extensions, spaceships, digital doubles, and FX simulations for massive battle sequences. Below, VFX supervisor Luc-Ewen Martin-Fenouillet reveals some of the challenges the team faced and the solutions they came up with for another example of how small-screen VFX are approaching the level of the best VFX movies.

MPC - Atlas VFX Breakdown - YouTube

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MPC says the most challenging sequence was the Planet Fall, a choreographed free fall from a spaceship in low orbit to a crash landing on the planet's surface. The sequence demanded precise planning and execution to capture the chaos and intensity of a continuous fall, with mechs battling drones in a dynamic environment. 

“We mapped a fall path from low orbit to the planet's surface for the action to take place, resulting in a scene covering several dozen kilometers,” MPC VFX Supervisor Supervisor Luc-Ewen Martin-Fenouillet says. “Atlas, in her Arc Suit, needed to start falling above the clouds, then enter an electric storm, and finally emerge right above the alien planet's surface."

To manage the scale, MPC created low-resolution geometries of clouds to have a faithful representation of the image composition without having to simulate volumes. Once the animation was blocked, the team converted these geometries to cloud shapes, categorized by altitude. "This way, cirrostratus remained only at high altitude while stratocumulus were found only at low altitude. This approach provided a subtle yet flexible way to tell the free-fall story of the sequence through cloud shapes,” Luc-Ewen says.

MPC’s work also involved recreating Los Angeles and Hong Kong as futuristic metropolises with giant hologram projections, mega-structures and flying vehicles. It created eight full-CG shots for a space flight between LA and the security gates outside Earth's atmosphere, devoting a lot of time to developing the security mesh that shields the planet from AI invasion to make it feel tangible and coherent with the human technology in the film. Meanwhile, the set of the giant military spaceship, the Dhiib, was extended to include additional bays, CG engineers, and soldiers.

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For Centurion Camp, MPC transformed a real disused factory into a well-protected camp in thick tropical jungle. The sequence, set in rainy conditions, features CG vegetation, cliffs, and robot interactions with plants, with simulated droplets splashing on leaves and flowers.

To achieve this, MPC says it built a modular Arc Suit cockpit rig that could orbit in all directions. It motion-tracked the cockpit and camera to integrate the practical plate into CG Arc Suits: providing the flexibility for robot animation and dynamic camera movements.

Atlas was released by Netflix on May 24, 2024. You can learn more on the MPC website.

If you're inspired by the work of MPC on Atlas, you might want to grab one of the best drawing tablets. Also take a look at our tutorials for Cinema 4D, as well as our explainers for core CG platforms Houdini and Unreal Engine 5.