The Righteous Gemstones

Unleashing a Plague

Unleashing a locust plague for The Righteous Gemstones was a tremendous undertaking for the Refuge team. For nearly 5 minutes of screen time, locusts invade the Gemstone TV studio and wreak havoc of biblical proportions.

The Locust

The Particle Cloud Swarm

Just like the real world, our locust started its life as a grasshopper. We developed our creature to be a little darker than usual to blend better with the “on-set” locusts that were staged by art department. Additionally, overall VFX supervisor Bruce Branit proposed deploying huge wind fans to blow small black “confetti” around the set and add to the visual chaos. This technique really helped the actors react to what was going on in the show.

We developed two techniques for creating swarms of locusts. The first was a rudimentary simple particle system for far away shots where you can’t make out the shape or definition of the locust. These particles were generated in the millions, to give a feeling of the swarm. Those millions of particles were then rendered as a point cloud, in order to get the feeling of a volume of locusts.

Render times weren’t an issue with this technique, but rather it was the sheer size of the data were were generating. We created multiple terabytes of data kicking out simulation after simulation, with millions of particles for each (nerd alert: thank God for CAT6a 10gig wiring).

The Simulated Swarm

Our second technique utilized a simulation system of flying animated locusts. The system allowed locust to fly around a volume, avoid obstacles, and even to land and take off again. We used this approach for about 80% of the shots in the episode. In this early test on the exterior of the television studio, locust are mostly on the door, but are also flying off and landing. These initial tests are funny since we didn’t do any custom animation yet, so locusts are flying like gliders and just rotating on the wall.

These simulated systems can be somewhat unpredictable, so, we also created tools that allowed us to “paint” locusts throughout a scene and place them exactly where they needed to be.

Building on that simulated system, our animators created about 25 custom animations for the locust, wired up by our FX team for each scene. This helped add variety and intention to the simulations.

Here’s a compilation of our work for the final episode using all the techniques above. We thank Bruce Branit for his leadership throughout the process, and the Hollywood Producers Association for the nomination in the category of

Best Supporting Visual Effects.