Lego Movie 2

I did relatively few shots on this show as most of my time was spent in a lead capacity. The biggest project for me was the brick environments where I needed to create gigantic piles of non-intersecting loose bricks that then had to be re-fed into the studio pipeline. There were a lot of rules for using the bricks on this show; you are only allowed to use actual Lego pieces, you are not allowed to scale them, and you can only use the actual Lego colors. The largest of the piles were close to six feet tall so I needed to construct over-sized ‘chunks’ of bricks to get the silhouettes to not be completely smooth.

Trolls

This was a fun show, mostly because I had plenty of glitter shots and for whatever reason I love doing them. This was such a cute film, I really enjoyed working in the ‘scrapbook’ world where everything is made of felt and fur. The hair shots were particularly challenging as we needed to hit a look described as ‘stop motion, but not’. I ended up using a procedural setup that blended into a simmed one, this way I had a lot of control over the initial staccato look but was still able to end with a more traditional hair sim.

How To Train Your Dragon 2

The Dragons movies are my absolute favorite. I’m kind of a D&D nerd at heart so being able to do dragon breath and flaming swords is a real treat. The Bewilderbeast ice breath in particular was a fun task. A setup already existed, but for the shots I had, it needed to be very fast, much faster than the given sim setup could evolve. I used a procedural solution of both volumes and clustered particles and then tweaked the rest of the setup to work with this kind of look. This resulted in a blast that felt very heavy and lethal. I watched a lot of reference of dams being drained to really get a feel for how massive amounts of water behave.

B.O.O. (Unreleased)

Bureau Of Otherworldly Operations was the last project I worked on at PDI before it closed. None of these are close to final and are all done with slap comps. I actually wish I had the prior iteration of the ‘ghost reveal’ because the fluid sim portion was much more visible and I thought it looked cool. I simmed the fluid ‘inside’ the characters T-pose, converted it to points, deformed those points using the characters skin as a wrap deformer, then reconverted the points to a volume for rendering. This gave a sim that evolved and filled the character, moving with the animation perfectly. I was very proud of myself for that solution.

Guardians

A lot of fun effects on this show. The magic was based around nightmare sand and dream sand, so we had a lot of particles to play with. My biggest project was the ‘frozen black sand tidal wave’. I was given a blank sky and told to create whatever I thought a frozen wave of magical black sand looked like, and then blow it up. It was a surprisingly ‘easy’ shot in that the supervisors basically liked what I showed almost immediately and it was just a matter of refining the look. I don’t know if they were incredibly open minded, crunched for time, or I legitimately did good work. Probably some combination of the three, but I’ll take it.

Gift of the Night Fury

The How to Train Your Dragon holiday special. My claim to fame was the ‘Yak Nog’ which was another open-ended “we don’t know what this looks like, go for it'“. I shot a LOT of reference in the cafe; mixing eggs with beer with grass with hair and anything else I could find. The scent was “unique”.

I also really liked working on the bubbles for the dragon egg dropping into the water. These are my favorite bubbles to date, it’s such a pretty sim.

Madagascar 3

I love the still for this video, I was very happy with how I was able to get those shapes for the “bear flashdance” and keep them in frame. Super ridiculous. I really wish were were able to get more water on her actual fur but at the time we didn’t have the back and forth from surfacing to get the hair into Houdini. Or we could but it was prohibitively difficult. Regardless it did the job.