Case Study: Netflix brings The Electric State’s robot characters to life with Foundry Mari

Netflix brings 61 robot characters to life with Foundry's Mari

Netflix faced the significant challenge of creating hundreds of believable, personality-driven robot characters for their VFX-intensive film "The Electric State." To reflect the movie's unique retro-futuristic aesthetic, the textures for these characters needed to be both grounded in reality and artistically creative. The visual effects vendor Digital Domain used Foundry's Mari to tackle this immense texturing workload.

The solution implemented by Foundry's Mari involved building a new, extensive material library that both the Texture and LookDev teams could use, streamlining the entire asset workflow. This allowed artists to paint detailed, photoreal textures that gave each robot a unique personality, from layered grime to extreme color combinations. The result was the successful creation of 61 uniquely designed hero robot characters and 480 total assets, with Mari's superior asset management handling complex characters that used as many as 280 UDIMs.

Netflix