Demo-reel shot breakdown, Rob House, February 2014

Simple flags for Arthur Christmas. Maya nCloth, using basic turbulence and lift.

This first attempt was eventually finalled, after answering requests for a slower look, which were not deemed as fitting.

The film required numerous one-off gags, and spontaneous responses for lesser-priority characters.

Sprouting-beard: I developed the method for animating a sudden reappearance of character's beard hair, and hand-timed it according to animation director's comments.

Pillow-head: Non-dynamic hairstyle I created for the scene.

Bearded scientist guy: A very low-budget response to a characiture sketch. (sketch shown on reel is an approximation of actual property)

Cloudy w/a Chance of Meatballs 2

I re-rigged previously-established hair styles (including dynamics R&D) to conform with newer hair simulation software and constraint methods.

These hairstyles were used for the vast majority of shots in the film. The two shots represented here are ones I had simulated, as well.

I was part of a small team of grass and plant landscapers, using a proprietary geo-instancing method for flowers, etc., and adaptations of standard hair-growing techniques for grasses.

Shown are scenes on which I managed the grass and flower work.

Hotel Transylvania

My initial assignment was R&D for Tablecloths as supporting characters. This was early in production and subject to much experimentation and revision. I used my own solutions in the shots shown, however several other Tablecloth rig methods were used in other situations.

I set up the oversized coat on Johnathan, which was interesting since it was a very poor fit for the character's body dimensions. In Maya nCloth, I was able to control collision offsets to puff-out the coat, and also controlled character collision-offsets, giving bulkier shoulders for collisions.

Typical of this film was a lot of sub-frame animation, which necessitated sub-frame simulations. In the case of this Dracula sim, I used Maya's geometry caching to slow-down the character for the rapid motion portions of performance.

Passenger Jonathan had a 180-degree torso twist, evidenced by his right-foot appearing on his left side. This necessitated a special runup, with pants on backwards!

Flying Dracula's cape was simulated only for basic swing and position, whereas all the high wind effects were deformations, primarily sine waves.

Arthur Christmas

I was included late in production on ARC and had to integrate myself quickly with the team.

I devised a way for chest-fur to respond to a wind-puff as the doors open. This was a procedural trick at render-time, not dynamically simulated.

The reins on Reindeer were an existing nCloth setup, which required much deformation and hand-animation on my part to collide correctly and reverberate with appropriate-looking tension.

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Green Lantern

This was a fun film to be involved with. I did some dynamic character-setup as well as many improvised solutions for one-off situations.

I assisted on Tomar-Re's rooster-comb (above, right) and worked-out a dynamics-driven IK solution for Apros, (below, orange), using in-house tools.

The red robes for Guardians were peculiar in that they hung about 30' down. This was mostly a draping and collision-avoidance challenge, although I also created a secondary rig to deform the character's jaw to avoid penetration with the gold collar.

Green, healing energy dome: I was directed to make this dome retract as if “silk on a freshly polished car”. I was asked to replace another effort to do it exclusively in cloth, and chose instead to drive a simple spline model built on six loft-curves, each controlled by a one-segment ribbon of nCloth, colliding with a dome standin.

There was call for a magic necklace rig, which could collide and react dynamically with character match-moves. As is often the case, most of the dynamic-reaction was taken out so as not to draw attention. I scripted this rig to self-build around the character, and in this way I managed to deliver the necklace for the whole sequence.

The chain-mail rig was so large and unruly, that a team of cloth TD's was assigned to individual shots. Driven by a huge mesh of dynamic cloth, it was necessary to pare-down resolution for unimportant areas, on a per-shot basis.

Watchmen

I was enlisted to adapt an existing cat-groom for this long-eared linx. My role was also to make it close-up ready.

Chris Yee did the awesome fur-animation in the second , reverse shot shown.

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I-Spy

I was charged with 'flying' this experimental stealth-fighter for both pre-vis and production. Other shots in the sequence were done by James Battersby.

I am Legend

I adapted existing approaches for the monumental task of enclosing skyscrapers in dynamic cloth. Done in SyFlex.

Deer grooms needed visual variations, by distance and gender. I devised a workable method of mapping irregularities in fur length and orientation for easy modification. Three distance grades were made with different hair thickness and density for each.

Special attention was given to the underside of the deer.

The fur-grooms for the adult lions, male and female were my creations. The little cubs were adapted from the adult female by another team member.

I also managed garment building and simulations on this film, as a lead T.D.

Ghost Rider

The leather riding-coat or 'duster' was done by me in Maya Classic cloth. I used a very low-resolution sub structure to keep the tails fanned-out, while the high-res cloth was constrained to it.

I designed the mane and tail for the horse, and developed dynamics for both.

The approximately 40 zombie-like 'wraiths' required individual costumes, based on a limited wardrobe of about 16 articles. I created an independent pipeline to create garments in shot-space, based on art-directed garment combos. Much MEL scripting was involved.

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Polar Express

As a lead cloth T.D, I received the most novel challenges. This was the most challenging shot I had accomplished up to that time. We employed a beta-version of geometry-to-cloth conversion software from Maya.

Several of my hair-styles are in the film as well, including the Mother figure.

Stuart Little 2

This costume was the most complicated for it's time. I created a zipperteeth-constraint method, and low-res cloth model for the backpack. The t-shirt was simmed, making three garment layers, plus colliding hood. The pants had higher resolution at the cuffs for a breakline off the shoes. The whole project was achieved with Maya 'panel-cloth', which required tailoring modifications to be made in 2D space exclusively.

My experience on the first Stuart Little (not shown) paid-off greatly, in terms of being able to manage the unpredictable nature of dynamic cloth at the time.

Copyright 2014, Rob House

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