Lux Aeterna turned time into a procedural system in The Dinosaurs
VFX studio Lux Aeterna explains how it built Houdini pipeline to compress millions of years of geological change into a single, continuous sequence for Netflix’s The Dinosaurs.
Across Netflix’s four-part documentary series The Dinosaurs, audiences travel across immense spans of geological time: the 165 million years that dinosaurs existed on earth.
UK-based VFX studio Lux Aeterna was responsible for the planetary transitions and evolving environments that connect those sequences, visualising millions of years of Earth’s history within continuous cinematic shots, created using a Houdini-based procedural environment pipeline.
A massive dust storm from The Dinosaurs. All of the major environment systems – including erosion, atmospheric effects and lighting – referenced a common timeline in Houdini.
Building time as a procedural variable
“The big narrative challenge was comprehension,” says Dan Tapster, showrunner at Silverback Films, which produced the series in association with Amblin Entertainment. “We were asking audiences to travel across vast spans of time, through completely different worlds, and still feel oriented. We wanted viewers to understand what had changed and why it mattered.”
Lux Aeterna built a procedural Houdini workflow in which time was the primary driver for every major environmental system. Terrain generation, vegetation growth, erosion, atmospheric effects, and lighting all referenced the same timeline, allowing landscapes to evolve continuously, rather than switching between separate environments.
Exposing time as a procedural parameter also made the sequence far easier to art direct. Changes to timing are propagated automatically across connected systems, allowing artists to refine pacing without rebuilding environments from scratch.
Part of a longer timelapse shot, in which jungles give way to exposed rock.
Growing and destroying worlds
Once the underlying timeline had been established, each environmental system was designed to respond to it independently.
Dense jungles were generated using Houdini’s procedural scattering and instancing tools. Heightfields and masks determined where vegetation could grow, while animated attributes controlled density, scale, and species distribution as landscapes evolved through time. As the sequence progressed, those environments transformed into unstable volcanic terrain, while custom shaders controlled transitions between cooled rock, exposed magma, and sediment.
The same philosophy extended to materials. Instead of painting textures for every version of the landscape, procedural masks generated from erosion, slope, and curvature automatically updated surface appearance as the terrain changed. Lava cooled, exposed rock emerged, sediment accumulated and moss appeared naturally as the underlying geometry evolved.
Water spreads through terrain in a cinematic wide shot.
Simulating geological processes
Water, atmosphere, and erosion all played an important role in selling the immense timescales represented within the sequence. Waterfalls were simulated using FLIP fluids, with secondary mist and spray generated from particle simulations driven by collision and velocity data. As water carved through the landscape, erosion of the terrain evolved alongside it, allowing rock formations to subtly change over time.
Cloud systems were also treated procedurally, combining cloud volumes with hyperlapse plates to create skies that accelerated dramatically throughout the sequence.
Above the environment, a custom orbital sun rig compressed the passage of days, seasons, and years into a single continuous movement. The sun’s position varied nonlinearly, helping communicate geological timescales while maintaining physically believable lighting.
Together, these interconnected systems reinforced the sensation that the viewer was travelling through deep time rather than simply watching a sequence of different environments.
Connecting sequences extended to views of the earth from space.
Keeping a planetary pipeline manageable
Compressing millions of years into a single shot created production challenges beyond the simulations themselves. Large terrain caches, vegetation scatters, volumetric clouds, and FLIP simulations all had to remain editable while the creative direction continued to evolve.
“Building the time-travel sequence was as much a technical and logistical challenge as it was a creative one,” says Lux Aeterna FX Supervisor Clive Llewellyn. “Beyond crafting evolving terrain, jungles, volcanoes, deserts, and waterfalls, the team had to solve issues around timescale, budget constraints, data management, collaboration, and iteration.”
To keep iteration fast, artists worked with lightweight proxy geometry and low-resolution simulations before committing to final caches. Custom level-of-detail tools automatically adjusted mesh complexity based on camera distance, while modular Houdini scenes allowed departments to publish terrain, FX, and lighting independently before assembling the final shot.
Heavy simulations were cached only after approval, procedural assets remained live for as long as possible, and reusable systems generated multiple geological eras from shared setups rather than separate environments. The result was a workflow that remained flexible even as the sequence grew in scale.
The formation of the Rocky Mountains, seen from a Low Earth Orbit position.
Making geological time feel cinematic
“Over half of the 62 shots we produced dealt with time travel,” says Lux Aeterna’s Senior CG Artist Paul Greer. “We were taking the narrative from one geological era to another, and that meant inventing creative solutions such as spinning timelapse star fields, landscapes that morph and change as we go back in time, and Low Earth Orbit satellite-style shots that show continents physically moving as the camera dives millions of years into the past.”
By treating time as a procedural system rather than a sequence of disconnected shots, Lux Aeterna created a workflow capable of producing continuous planetary evolution while giving filmmakers the flexibility to refine the experience throughout production.
For the audience, the result is a seamless journey through deep time. For the artists behind it, it demonstrates how procedural workflows in Houdini can transform not only how environments are built, but how time itself can become part of the animation system.
See the artist credits for The Dinosaurs on Lux Aeterna’s website
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