Blackmagic Design announced that L.A.-based Muse VFX used Fusion 9 Studio, its VFX and motion graphics software, on FX’s critically acclaimed drama Legion. Based on the Marvel Comics by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, Legion is the story of “David Haller” (Dan Stevens), a man who believed himself to be schizophrenic only to discover that he may actually be the most powerful mutant the world has ever seen. 

Led by founders and VFX supervisors John Gross and Fred Pienkos, the Muse VFX team used Fusion Studio for the second season of the hit TV series. “A lot of our work on the show’s VFX revolved around characters and creatures, everything from monsters to mice,” said Pienkos.

One of those creatures was the “Delusion Monster,” which began in the season’s first episode by hatching from an egg and grew over the season run to reach gigantic proportions.

“The baby ‘Delusion Monster’ was covered in sticky black goo and it left footprints wherever it went, so I came up with a way to create them in Fusion Studio,” said VFX generalist Bryan Ray. “The Ambient Occlusion buffer from the render showed where the creature’s feet touched the floor, so I used the Trails tool to make the footprints linger after he took another step. Then I used a couple of custom macros to give the footprints some volume and reflectivity.”

By episode six, the “Delusion Monster” had grown in scale to fill entire rooms. To help with its lighting, Muse VFX used Fusion Studio’s SDK to create MultiMerge Fuse for performing merges, which is now available for public use through Reactor, a free and open source package manager for Fusion and DaVinci Resolve.