A VFX Achievement of Extraordinary Scale

Dune: Part Two presented its VFX teams with a unique challenge: creating the vast, living world of Arrakis in a way that felt physically real — not like a digital fantasy, but like a place audiences could believe in. Director Denis Villeneuve's commitment to practical photography wherever possible set the VFX work in a demanding context. Every digital element had to integrate seamlessly with real sand, real light, and real actors.

The film's visual effects were distributed across multiple VFX vendors, with DNEG, Framestore, and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) among the key contributors — each responsible for different sequences and visual systems.

The Sandworms: Engineering a Living Creature

The sandworms of Arrakis are among the most recognizable creature designs in science fiction. For Part Two, they needed to feel massive — not just large, but geologically enormous, like living forces of nature.

Key challenges in bringing them to screen included:

  • Scale and weight: Animators and TDs had to develop simulation systems that conveyed the correct sense of scale. The sand displacement as a worm travels below the surface was a complex simulation task combining rigid body and fluid-like behavior.
  • Surface detail at distance: A creature this large needs surface texture that reads at extreme long shots as well as close-up. Procedural texturing systems in Houdini and ZBrush-generated displacement maps layered together to achieve this.
  • Lighting integration: The harsh Arrakeen sun is a distinct photographic quality throughout the film. Matching CG elements to this lighting — especially specular highlights on the worm's segmented rings — required careful look development and on-set HDRI capture.

Sand and Environment Simulation

Sand is notoriously difficult to simulate convincingly. The granular material behavior — the way it slumps, flows, is disturbed by impact or movement — requires either highly optimized particle simulation or sophisticated procedural approaches.

The teams used a combination of:

  • Houdini FLIP simulations for large-scale flowing sand behavior
  • Procedural displacement and wind systems for dune surface animation and atmospheric sand
  • Practical sand passes shot on location (the film used real desert locations in Jordan and Abu Dhabi) that were augmented and extended digitally

The philosophy — shoot as much real sand as possible, then enhance — is a recurring theme in how Villeneuve and his teams approach digital work. Grounding digital elements in real-world photography gives them a tangibility that full CGI environments often lack.

The Harkonnen Arena: High-Contrast Photography and VFX

One of the film's most discussed visual sequences takes place in the Harkonnen arena, shot in stark black-and-white using infrared-sensitive cameras. This created a distinctive, otherworldly aesthetic that also presented VFX teams with an unusual technical brief: integrating digital elements into infrared monochrome footage.

The teams had to develop custom look development pipelines to ensure CG elements — crowd simulation, environmental extensions, digital doubles — matched the response of the camera to infrared light rather than standard visible spectrum color.

Lessons from Dune's VFX Approach

There's much for VFX artists and students to take away from examining this film's approach:

  • Practical and digital are strongest together. The most convincing shots in the film ground CG in real photography.
  • Scale is a storytelling tool. Technical decisions about how to convey worm scale are ultimately creative decisions about how the audience feels in those moments.
  • Constraint creates creativity. The infrared sequence forced teams to solve an unusual problem — and the result is one of the most visually distinctive sequences in recent blockbuster cinema.

Dune: Part Two demonstrates that even in an era of increasingly capable AI and digital tools, the highest-quality VFX work still comes from teams with deep craft knowledge, close collaboration with filmmakers, and an unwillingness to take shortcuts where quality matters.