Detective Pikachu Psyonic Wave

Description

Rigging

I created a procedural rig for the trees in this shot (as well as the rest of the sequence). It is flexible enough to be used for trees, bushes, and grass alike. The rig is a complete rewrite of the previous rig that our department used, and it is far more capable than its predecessors. For this shot, I rigged 12 variations of trees which all needed to produce similar dynamic behavior from the impact of the blast.

Simulation

I simulated each individual tree in the foreground and midground to give the best possible reaction to the blast. I wrote some software to be able to adjust the blast strength, timing, and direction, depending on the placement of the tree. Finally, I glued together all of the pieces with our pipeline which was able to run the simulations in parallel.

Pipeline Tools

This shot is representative of many different tools that I created in order to produce shots of this nature on this film (and many films to come):

1. Leaf Simulator - C++ node for simulating leaf dynamics very quickly. I rewrote this node from scratch and used rotational dynamics to produce realistic leaf behavior. The node can be driven by a separate wind field node, or simply from the drag caused by movement of the tree limbs.
2. Wind Field - C++ field node. This is another complete rewrite of a less capable node that our department already had. I added the ability for artists to shape the wind shadow of occluding objects in the field, and I improved the performance of the node.
3. Rigging Tools - I designed the procedural environment dynamics rig used on this show, and I created a tool for artists with no programming knowledge to produce it, and integrate it with our pipeline in a couple of clicks.
4. Simulation Tools - This show required new pieces of pipeline for environment dynamics. I wrote all of the code for our department to be able to integrate with the changes. Shots of this nature can now be run by artists with no programming background through the use of my tools.
5. Generic Cache Tool - The background trees consists of instanced generic caches. The artist that generated those caches used a tool that I created to quickly produce them and make them pipeline friendly.