Visual Effects
Cinematic & Motion Pictures Visual Effects
We have been working on the technical development of visual effects for the following movies (copyright of the images is held by their respective studios).
Links with the “←” sign contain a little shot breakdown and description.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Houdini, in-house software
Created the Jabberwocky spit effect – stay tuned!
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ←
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Houdini, in-house software
The spaghetti twister is a complex 1D (spaghetti strands) + 2D (hollow funnel) + 3D space juggling act, procedurally generated and animated in Houdini. The volumetric clouds are animated procedurally in Houdini, lit, then rendered using Sony’s volume renderer Svea.
For the Jell-O palace sequence, an elaborate oscillator was written in Houdini VEX that allowed FX animators to rapidly develop the typical Jell-O judder motion, without the need for simming.
HellBoy II: The Golden Army
Artist: Moritz Moeller
Tools: Maya, PRMan
Look development lead for the ‘Tooth Fairy’ creature, including some RenderMan shader writing (PRMan) and some texture painting. Render plumbing during lighting of the ‘Tooth Fairy’/New York Warehouse sequence, some lighter hand holding. Lighting & rendering of several shots on the ‘Tooth Fairy’/New York Warehouse sequence. Developed multi-threaded network texture caching RenderMan plugin. This duplicates 100% of the functionality of 3Delight’s built-in texture cache for PRMan.
Texture caching plugin also used on ‘Batman — The Dark Knight’ which was in production at Double Negative, at the same time.
Watchmen
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Houdini
Helped out on the debris for the Crystal Palace shot – the one where the palace emerges from the Mars surface.
CJ7 (Cheung Gong 7 hou)
Artist: Paolo Berto
Tools: Maya, 3Delight
Look development lead for the “CJ7″ creature: development of RSL (3Delight) hair shader, switched pipleine of subsurface scattering for the character body from mental ray to 3Delight. RIB Pipline design Maya > Shave’n'Haircut > 3Delight. Acted as point of contact for all things 3Delight-related.
Surfs’Up! ←
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Houdini, RenderMan
When joining the Surf’s Up team at Sony Imageworks, we were asked do develop a solution for shore break – or beach break – for the 2 beaches featured in the movie. It soon became clear that the beach break would be visible in many shots (about 70). For that reason we envisioned a highly procedural setup, ideally allowing a TD to generate beach break for a shot in less than an hour. And this without overloading the Imageworks renderfarm in the process.
Superman Returns ←
Artist: Christos Obretenov
Tools: Houdini, 3Delight
Develop the 3D CG corn fields in Superman Returns where the young Superman is learning to fly.
Beowulf
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Houdini, RenderMan
Adapted the Surf’s Up beachbreak water system for some ocean shots.
Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Houdini, RealFlow, RenderMan
Designed the hero splashes for the Chocolate River ride, and created many of the effects for the melting Chocolate Palace sequence.
Valiant
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Maya, RenderMan
Water and foliage effects.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Artist: Moritz Moeller
Tools: Maya, RenderMan
Maintained & improved Liquid Maya to RenderMan translator. Acted as point of contact for all things 3Delight-related.
Charlotte’s Web
Artist: Moritz Moeller
Tools: Softimage XSI, 3Delight
Wrote XSI to RenderMan (3Delight) exporter ‘Affogato’. Wrote various RenderMan shaders for spider skin, -fur, -eyes and macro spider web. Main character look development (Charlotte, the spider). Wrote various parts of the pipeline, e.g. parts of the Relax renderfarm frontend for Sun’s GridEngine, Xsi—pipeline glue scripts, etc. Helped with the introduction of Render-Man-compliant 3Delight renderer into pipeline at all levels.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of The King
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Maya, RenderMan, 3rd part Fluid Simulators
Integration of multi-layered animated mattepaintings and 3d objects in environments with tricky parallax and heavy camera motion. Prepared the lava particle simulations for the Gollum drop and Mt.Doom eruption, using animated and static collision objects, outputting particle and poly data for rendering coordinated the development of 3rd party fluid simulation software against tight deadlines, bringing the feature set a full version further. Enabling the software to handle millions of particles and very heavy poly sets. Built the poly set -> renderman pipeline, including the pioneering procedural shaders for UV texture bombing shader dragged along the polyset by the underlying particles, morphed and shaded according to particle behavior and attributes.
mount doom shot breakdown
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Artist: Tom Kluyskens
Tools: Maya, Shake, RenderMan
Wrote a Maya to Shake system for averageing 2K hardware rendered images into motionblurred fire and smoke layers, and rendered many of those layers. Built a sprite-based flooding system based on filmed water textures and Maya fluids to fill huge areas with wild water. Inserted background ‘cycs’, replaced skies and environments with correct parallax for sweeping camera moves. Helped speeding up the Gollum facial system for higher interactivity and better control over his facial expression
Tom’s LOTR reel:
The Seeker: The Dark is Rising
Artist: Moritz Moeller
Tools: Maya, 3Delight
Wrote procedural deformation system for memory-efficient render-time instancing of thousands of snake creatures along guide curves for the 3Delight renderer.
Free Jimmy
Artist: Moritz Moeller
Tools: Maya, RenderMan
Complete design of RenderMan “bake once” pipeline including all tools, plugins and scripts required and/or connected.
Design of database-driven approach to Lighting-time rendering attribute tweaking through RenderMan procedural geometry plugin. Design of Maya Mel-based plug-ins to support maximum failsave and efficient usage of the pipeline by artists and Tds. Shader writing for added post-surfacing automatic multipass rendering support.
