Shot Breakdown

He-Lectrix Lightning Attack

I was asked to create a lightning attack for the wannabe superhero “He-lectrix” in Incredibles 2. He was described as a stylish superhero with the ability manipulate energy. I tried to bring the stylization of hand drawn effects into the attack, but still have the effect exist in the 3D world. I procedural modeled all of the electricity assets using VEX in Houdini. I pulled out many attributes like noise frequency, noise amplitude, decay, bolt multiplication, etc. to be randomly seeded to create an erratic look.

Splash

This is a splash from Finding Dory. I used Houdini flip to simulate the water. I rendered it with a combination of surfaces and points.

Taser Electricity Look Dev

In this sequence from Incredibles 2 the Screenslaver attacks Elastigirl with a cattle prod. I created the chain lightning around Elastigirl by procedurally mapping curves on her in a static pose and them transposing them into her UV space. The curves would recognize if they were touched by the cattleprod and they would illuminate along their arc. Contributing artists were Vincent Seritella and Ferdi Scheepers.

Car Smoke

This is car smoke I did for Cars 3 using the rig built for the show. This was simulated in houdini using the pyro solver.

Mouth Bubbles

I simulated bubbles coming out of Mr Incredible’s mouth as he’s tossed around under the Hydroliner in Incredibles 2. The director asked for these bubbles to accentuate the comedy of his bouncing off of the hydrofoils. I hand animated the gross motion of the escaping bubbles and finished by running a volume sim using the pyro solver to get the “jellyfish” looking shapes of the bubbles.

Snot

Your basic fish sneezing on the glass of its tank. I procedurally modeled and animated this based off of specific direction from art.

Jack-Jack Teleport/Violet Force Field

This is a cut scene from the Incredicoaster at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. I implemented both of these shot using rigs built for the show.

Bug Spray

This is a scene from Cars 3 where a car is training for races on a simulator. He get sprayed in the face with a simulated swarm of bugs. I used the Houdini pryo solver for the smoke. I used the smoke solver to inform the swarming motion of the bugs. I used Pixar’s crowds pipeline to turn the swarm into a crowd of Volkswagen Beetles.

Ocean Particulate

We made a lot of floating particulate as a team for Finding Dory. This scene of a giant squid emerging from a shipping container is a good example of many shots I did like this. The particulate is meant to feel suspended in the water and swirled by the motion of the fish. I used houdini pyro to get the churning motion for the particles.

Tide Pool

I created the look of this tide pool based on pools I observed at aquariums. The motion of the water is procedurally animated. I created the surface bubbles procedurally and animated them to make the water surface.

Small Containers

I did a lot of shots of Dory being carried around in small containers. First, there were hero moments that needed to be handled as full simulations. This included Hank the octopus scooping Dory out of the tank and her falling off a pipe into a chum bucket. For the rest of the shots, I developed a rig that would restage the container at the origin, turn the original gravity and container movement into a force vector, simulate the container of liquid, mesh it, and return it to object space. Restaging the sim at the origin had several advantages. First, the container geometry did not rotate, so there was no loss of volume in the fluid by particles escaping the container. Second, the container movement’s velocity could be used as a force vector, allowing the simulation to happen in one location. This also resulted in less volume loss for the duration of the simulation. The rig worked in about 80% of the shots it was used in. From there, individual artists could add additional ripples of splashes as necessary.