Look Development, Lighting, and Dynamic Animation. For this science fiction film directed by the Strauss Brothers, I worked directly with them and about 70 other artists in a final 2 month production frenzy to finish hundreds of shots for the film.  I personally did dynamic simulations of the mothership crashing into the deforming ground throwing houses, cars, trees, dirt and debris through the air.  After using Rigid Body Dynamics to animate street lights, power poles, lines, and buildings to fall I then lit and rendered many scenes for final.

This Tom Cruise with Cameron Diaz comedy action film turned out to be a very fun big Hollywood movie with great Visual Effects and some humor as it makes fun of Action genre.  I worked on the plane crash sequence in the beginning of the film with lighting and Look Development for the airplane as it was flying as well as crashing into the corn field.  Dynamic Animation here means modeling and sculpting an animated growing ground trench for the plane to crash into.  Once I have the ground animated with blend shapes I constrain 1000’s or corn stalks to pivot and fly up in the air as the ground mounds up, as well as dirt and earth chunks that fly up from this same trench motion.

For this film we had a great collection of on set Spheron HDR images that capture all the color and light details of the ship interior.  They handed me the full inside gunship fighting sequence with John Malkovich and Josh Brolin and asked me to make all the shaders, do the simple animations, supervise the camera tracks, light, and final the 20 plus shots.  Using the best HDR image out of the collection I created linear color workflow shaders and matched the lighting on set with roughly 30 scaled and placed area lights, which allows Mental Ray with Maya rendering to do the magic.

I have to admit this is a little embarrassing to post my small contribution to the film Avatar, but here it is and in the movie theater this shot was the first with strong obvious stereoscopic effect.  My task was to create and animate drops of water floating and combining  in zero-gravity with RealFlow, then light and render out through Maya and Mental Ray.

For the destruction of Hawaii sequence (5 shots) I used Maya for Look-dev, lighting, and matte-painting camera projections of the Waikiki skyline, then fluids and dynamics for adding smoke, lava, and water splashes to destroy the city.