‘It was really fun in a gruesome sort of a way’: The story behind 3 Body Problem’s intense ship scene

polygon.com:

Adapting Cixin Liu’s scientifically dense novel The Three-Body Problem is no easy feat. The book is filled with page after page of detailed descriptions of scientific processes, from the impact three suns would have on a single planet to how a proton-sized supercomputer could interfere with the results of every particle accelerator on Earth simultaneously.

It’s a challenge for showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo for sure, as they had to make tough decisions on which elements of the novel to show, which to tell, and which to simply gloss over. But it was also an especially difficult job for the Netflix 3 Body Problem series’ visual effects team, who were tasked with bringing many of the novel’s most difficult concepts to life — communicating advanced scientific processes described in painstaking detail in the book, but understandably slimmed down to their core visual elements for a television audience.

“We definitely had some challenges with the more abstract stuff,” VFX supervisor Stefen Fangmeier, who worked with Benioff and Weiss on Game of Thrones, told Polygon. “For some of it, they basically just copied it straight out of the book, and now I have to figure out what it should look like. [Like] inside the particle accelerator to show how [the Sophon] is disrupting these particle elements, and the dimensional unfolding from the 10th dimension of a proton down to two dimensions. Even stuff like the countdown. It’s incredibly challenging, because we did so many versions of that, and didn’t want it to look like an alarm clock, but it had to be legible.”

Fangmeier says a crucial part of the sprawling VFX team was BUF, a Paris-based company who worked on the Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted revamp of the science documentary series Cosmos. Their experience in high science work (and their in-house software) was “essential” in the team’s ability to communicate some of the more difficult scientific processes.

One of the biggest projects for the VFX team (and