STAR TREK SECTION 31
After working on the final season of Star Trek: Discovery and season 3 of Strange New Worlds, our team was brought onto Star Trek: Section 31 as a trusted VFX partner within the Trek universe. Returning to these worlds is always a privilege, not just because of their scale, but because they invite a level of curiosity and craft that continues to push the technical and creative edges of our work.
We were tasked with completing the Hardscrabble Farm sequence, featuring a large army of digidoubles beaming into a fully realised environment, alongside digital matte painting, FX, clean-up, and compositing. We loved the challenge of making complex, large-scale ideas feel grounded and believable, while still having the freedom to explore visuals and concepts that simply do not exist in the real world.
STAR TREK SECTION 31
TRAILER
ASSETS SCANS
Using supplied body and face scans, we built clean, production-ready digidoubles with animation-friendly topology and rigging. From this base, we developed a modular system where heads, hair, body variations, and texture sets could be procedurally swapped, giving us efficient control over variation at scale and allowing large crowds to feel dense, believable and cohesive.
To support accurate integration, we also worked from supplied LiDAR scans of the environment, using them to build supporting assets, track cameras, and assist with clean-up. This grounded the work in real-world scale and detail, ensuring the digidoubles sat naturally within the scene and maintained consistency across the sequence.
HOUDINI CROWDS
We built a fully procedural crowd system in Houdini, using agent-based tools to manage large-scale character population and motion. Our randomised soldier assets were driven through a logic-based setup with animation triggers, introducing natural variation in movement, timing, and behaviour while retaining control across the entire crowd.
The final crowd was rendered in Karma XPU, leveraging instancing and USD-based workflows alongside physically accurate lighting and shading. This approach allowed us to deliver efficient, scalable renders while maintaining a photoreal look that held up across wide shots and close inspection.
ATMOSPHERIC PARTICULATE
We reused a hero 3D particulate asset as the foundation element for our atmospheric work, choosing a fully three-dimensional approach rather than relying on traditional 2D comp effects with depth passes. This decision was driven by the plates themselves, which featured tangible foreground particulate captured in camera and demanded a spatially accurate, volumetric solution.
By adapting the asset across multiple scales and densities, we were able to build rich, layered atmospheres that introduced natural parallax, light interaction, and depth. This helped integrate characters and environments more convincingly, adding richness to the scene while maintaining a high level of realism throughout the sequence.
GORE EFFECTS
We developed a bespoke procedural effect in Houdini to simulate the melting and stretching skin tearing off our victim’s face from a hot metal sword. Using Houdini’s Vellum and grain solvers, we were able to art-direct the stretch, thinning, and tearing behaviour across the surface in a physically believable way, with fine control over timing.
Typically, we try to find real word visual reference to maintain a believable look but in this case of tearing skin, we opted for something a little less gruesome. Studying the characteristic “cheese pull” found in melted pizza and toasted sandwiches, we translated that stringy, elastic quality into something organic and unsettling, with fine control over timing, tension, and breakup to achieve a visceral final look.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Our work on Star Trek: Section 31 reflects the kind of projects we’re drawn to – technically demanding, creatively ambitious, and grounded in strong collaboration. From large-scale procedural crowds to detailed FX work, our focus was on building solutions that feel cohesive, believable, and considered, even under the pressures of a feature pipeline.
It’s this combination of curiosity, craft, and reliability that allows us to continue contributing to complex productions at scale, supporting stories that require both technical precision and creative judgement.
