Mando takes on a Dark Trooper outside the cold storage room in a sequence that had about 70 shots from Hybride. "There were super closeups of the robot and of Mando as he is thrown around," recalls Kasparian, "and very often they were full CG. Like the work we did with L3 (Solo: A Star Wars Story), they shot the actor wearing a robot suit for the fight and they wanted us to keep as much as we could of the performer, and replace parts of the suit. But the suit would often move in all directions in the plates, so we used it as a reference for many shots. Still, there was so much happening with the action and framing in this fight, it was very important to keep the performer's choreography, which we tried mimicking with our CG Dark Trooper. However, the way the Dark Troopers move and punch is very mechanical, and the guy in the suit wasn't able to move in a mechanical way so we added that look on our side."

"In the original brief, Jon Favreau suggested that the droids could play around with the Razor Crest then the doors could open and all the wires would come spilling out and one of them would get its face sucked in by a tube. Our team did all the animation for those shots."

"It was a big set built with a pond surrounded by a wall," explained Joseph Kasparian, "we created set extensions which were mainly buildings and roof tops, to help establish the city of Calodan behind the wall. "We also designed and animated the fully CG Droid that sort of looks and moves like a soldier, so we needed to do a bit of motion study to get the movements right."

"We didn't have to augment the plates, except to add CG dust trails behind the speeder, and ensure proper interaction with the ground," noted Joseph Kasparian. "We were going to have many of these types of shots throughout several episodes, so we had to establish the look of the dust trails seen from afar and in super close-ups."

"There was a partial set and maybe one rock that was about 10' high x 15' wide and from there we had to create a set extension and a whole environment where a fight between Mando and a Bounty Hunter would take place," noted Kasparian. "Jon Favreau wanted to use as much location photography as possible for the sky and mountains in the background, and mountains that were in the middle ground would be from photogrammetry."

From Nevarro to the base

Hybride artists also animated the Razor Crest ship as it lands in Nevarro. Since they had created the dusty volcanic wasteland in season 1, the team was already familiar with the Nevarro environment which was pretty much destroyed at the end of the first season as a result of the battle that took place there when the Mandalorians came to Mando's rescue.

For this second season, the studio rebuilt the city and brought it to life. "Our modeling department meticulously recreated a huge marketplace that included CG buildings, awnings, different types of props and CG characters. We couldn't just use old assets we had from last season to recreate building facades; we needed to make everything feel newer than last season," Kasparian added. 

Indoor and outdoor CG environments, as well set extensions, were also created for sequences taking place at the Imperial Base where our protagonists plan on blowing up the reactor. "The assets we received from Lucasfilm were built for the volume so we adjusted everything in a higher resolution so it would fit in seamlessly with the actual set," recounted Kasparian. Numerous set extensions were also created for the Imperial Base Shuttle Pad, including all of the corridors where the scenes had been filmed on blue screen. The Hybride team also created FX for the blaster fights between our heroes and the storm troopers and molten lava was also created for the heat shaft sequence. ILM took care of making the reactor blow.

Based on concept art provided by Lucasfilm VP and Executive Creative Director Doug Chiang, Hybride artists created the CG version of the massive creatures. "Since the prop they were using on set didn't have any type of rig on it, we could use it as a reference to see how the light would react on top of the massifs," noted Kasparian. "After doing a bunch of tests we designed a model that matched the one that they had on set, then did CG variations of the Massifs so we could get 5 of them into the sequence."

"The Mandalorian" stars Pedro Pascal, with guest stars Gina Carano, Carl Weathers and Giancarlo Esposito. Directors for the new season include Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rick Famuyiwa, Carl Weathers, Peyton Reed and Robert Rodriguez. Showrunner Jon Favreau serves as executive producer along with Dave Filoni, Kathleen Kennedy and Colin Wilson, with Karen Gilchrist and Carrie Beck serving as co-executive producers. The writers for this season are Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni and Rick Famuyiwa.