Shrek Forever After Demo Reel

Breakdown

• 00:00:00 - Smoke columns.
• 00:00:03 - Martini. For this film, I set up a procedural martini system that avoided costly fluid sims. The system uses a soft body in Maya to create a top surface for oscillating contained liquids with realistic fluid-like motion. The setup allows for advanced controls, including initial starting angle, tilt clamp, and height within the container, which can be animated to convey both filling and emptying the glass. The surface is subsequently taken into Houdini for post-processing: fitting the surface to the glass, creating a meniscus, and generating a wet map on the glass surface. The martini system was used throughout the film on over twenty shots, enabling rapid turnaround and approval.
• 00:00:29 - Martini pouring. One of the few shots in the film where I had to use a fluid simulation in combination with the procedural martini system.
• 00:00:43 - Martinis, as well as hand-animated toothpicks in empty glasses.
• 00:01:10 - More martinis, including a slow-motion close-up shot.
• 00:01:21 - The eight martinis held by the frogs were done and approved using the martini system in less than half a day.
• 00:01:31 - Exploding feathers. I used nCloth in Maya to simulate the fluttering motion in this and the subsequent shots.
• 00:01:40 - Water in the glass, water splash, dripping water as the witch melts. This shot used at least five different techniques, including the martini system and particle sims.
• 00:01:53 - Pouring milk.
• 00:02:08 - Milk ripples. This was a combination of the martini system and Maya's ripple deformer.
• 00:02:15 - Smoke puff.
• 00:02:17 - Ogre shield discoball explosion. For this set of shots, I had to work closely with modeling and crowds to assemble the shields into a single ball and then animate them exploding in such a way that crowds would be able to parent their agent animations to the shields' trajectories. There were also hand-animated loose shields that had to clear the crowds. One of the biggest challenges on these shots was avoiding interpenetrations between closely placed shields by staggering the explosion for different elements.
• 00:02:25 - Trickling debris from the log.
• 00:02:30 - Slo-mo Shrek spit. This was done using hand-animated spacial curves.