Midweek Motivations: The Orville Season 2 VFX

The Orville is one of my favorite shows on television. It’s a science fiction show from Seth McFarlane (Family Guy), who is spaceship captain on The U.S.S. Orville, set 400 years in the future. It’s a similar The show has really come a long way!  I was reading just this morning that there will be a series of The Orville comic books coming out soon too.

The Orville Season 2 VFX have been impressive, to say the least, and we have videos from Pixomondo and FuseFX, showing their epic work on the program.

The Orville Season 2 VFX Show Reel

The city that they fly over is just stunning. The video below is the showreel of Pixomondo, who also did work on Mary Poppins Returns, Crazy Rich Asians, Overlord, The Girl in the Spider Web, and more.

If you’re wondering, Pixmondo renders with V-Ray [source]

This video below shows a lot of the same footage but gives you a bit more story, if you’re curious. This video was linked from the 3ds Max blog, where they tell us:

All previs and assets were previously developed in Maya, so we had to create a seamless system to ingest these Maya assets and prep them for final VFX shot work in 3ds Max. –

In particular, 3ds Max’s Alembic feature made all of the difference. Learn more at The Orville: FuseFX talks custom 3ds Max pipeline – Autodesk, 3ds Max Blog by Changsoo Eun, 2 May 2019

FuseFX: The Orville Episode 209 Space Battle (VFX Breakdown)

This is an impressive 8-minute long scene of a space battle between Krill fighting Kaylons, created by FuseFX. If you don’t watch the show, just know that they are both bad guys, with the Kaylons in the round ships and the Krill in the spiky looking ships. Incidentally, FuseFX has a custom 3ds Max pipeline that they use for work on the show.

Learn more about this scene

• The Orville – Creating a nearly 8 Minute Space Battle Spectacle! FuseFX, 29 March 2019
• The Orville’s Battle of Identity at FuseFX, FxGuide by Mike Seymour, 4 March 2019
• VFX Battle Stations! Space Wars In The Orville, VFX Voice, by Ian Failes, 30 May 2019

Previous Posts about The Orville

Midweek Motivation: Orville, a new Seth MacFarlane Enterprise