When Cities Contract Digital Diseases
In Rich Flu, Entropy Studio didn't create visual effects - they cultivated an infection. Every building, every alley, and every surface in this dystopia is not only contaminated, but alive in the most unsettling way possible. The studio achieved what few horror movies manage: making the setting itself the monster. 🦠🏙️
"We wanted viewers to feel itchy looking at the asphalt" - Entropy Studio VFX Supervisor
Anatomy of a Visual Pandemic
The digital infection pipeline included:
- Houdini for viscous memory fluid simulations
- Maya modeling creatures emerging from urban structures
- Substance texturing surfaces that seem to breathe
- Nuke infecting real footage with up to 75 layers of horror
Visual Symptoms of Rich Flu
The most disturbing details included:
- Buildings that "sweat" alien substances
- Glass that melts like organic membranes
- Streets that pulse with almost imperceptible throbs
- Spores that float following real contagion patterns
As one artist commented: "We programmed fear into the viscosity parameters". The movie doesn't show horror - it infects. 💉
Physics of the Repulsive
The simulations followed disturbing biological rules:
- Fluids that behave like conscious organisms
- Structures that grow following infection patterns
- Textures that evolve throughout the movie
- Reflections that progressively distort reality
When the Render Farm Becomes a Laboratory
The team developed specific techniques for:
- Simulating mutations that differ in each city zone
- Creating organic transitions between infection states
- Maintaining coherence in the visual virus "evolution"
- Optimizing renders of extremely dense simulations
As the VFX director aptly summarized: "If at the end of your shift you dreamed of viscous membranes, you knew you were on the right track". The true success of this work is that, like a virus, it lodges in the viewer's mind and keeps growing after the credits. Because in horror cinema, the best effects are not the ones you see, but the ones you can't stop imagining. 🎥⚠️