The Megamind FX team was challenged with the destruction of Metro City, which was populated with a mixture of hand-modeled and procedurally generated buildings. Bidding the film told us that that over a third of all effects in the film…
Continue Reading→We introduce a new set of techniques for coherent out-of-core point-based global illumination and ambient occlusion. As described in [Christensen 2008], point-based global illumination (PBGI) operates on a dense point representation of the scene. Points are diffusely shaded and are roughly…
Continue Reading→When working with antique sets, cobwebs are one of the essential elements that set up the right atmosphere. The complex nature of cobwebs makes them difficult to build by hand. We want to utilize the accuracy of simulated effects, the…
Continue Reading→Exploding a super hero in DreamWorks Animation’s “MegaMind” was a large scale task. The detail and scale of the explosion was to be massive and the collaboration between effects artists unprecedented. This created several technical hurdles and eventually several innovations such as: a fluid clamping plugin, a volume splatting tool adjustable by noise, and a collaborative caching tool. Research Paper for “MEGAMIND” : FIRE, SMOKE AND DATA
Continue Reading→In Dreamworks Animation’s Megamind, the production faced a challenge in creating a shot where the top of a skyscraper is torn off and hurled down a city street, destroying portions of the city and creating a massive dust cloud. Development…
Continue Reading→The Lord Shen character in Kung Fu Panda 2: The Kaboom of Doom, is a peacock requiring subtle performance yet also the capability to achieve a variety of challenging kung fu stunts. We present the Lord Shen’s tail rig and…
Continue Reading→We have developed a new data structure for the efficient representation of sparse, time-varying volumetric data discretized on a 3D grid. Our “DB+Grid” , so named because it is a Dynamic Blocked Grid that shares several characteristics with B+Trees (typically…
Continue Reading→After the success of Dreamworks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda, (KFP) we were challenged with making the sequel take place in a much bigger world. The story called for higher stakes and a correspondingly more epic setting for the film’s main…
Continue Reading→In the Dreamworks Animation film Megamind, our main visual goal for the sequence where Roxanne is kidnapped by Titan, is for the audience to experience first hand the grave danger that she is going through. To achieve this goal, we…
Continue Reading→The visual divide between simulated and natural phenomenon is one that shrinks every year, however solving the novel problem of capturing an aesthetic renews with each new idea. The Filigree Effect, developed for DreamWorks Animation’s feature film Shrek Forever After,…
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