For this film, I served multiple roles. I continued my character effects technology support where I primarily supported the upgrades to the character effect vegetation and environment deformation toolset, a significant upgrade to the cfx finaling system and the continuation of the Dreamworks Feather System support. Additionally, I served an uncredited role as a CFX shot artist, running the cfx work for various shots on the film
The Bad Guys 2
Continuing off the completion of The Wild Robot with the upgraded feather system, the feather toolset was also used for The Bad Guys 2. I continued my character effect technology support for this film, helping to address the stylized shape language of this new film
The Wild Robot
At the time of writing, this is one of the most significant projects of my career. My work from Kung Fu Panda 4 continued into The Wild Robot in which I developed and supported the DreamWorks Feather System. The Wild Robot had roughly a dozen different bird characters, so focus was on quality of life improvements, bug fixes, and some more advanced tool updates. One of the more significant challenges involved an Owl character whose head feathers and body feathers had to slide on top of each other without stretching or twisting artifacts.
Myself and my colleagues, Cory Sivek and Kurt Phillips, discussed our work on the DreamWorks Feather System in our SIGGRAPH 2024 talk A Modernization of the DreamWorks Feather System.
Kung Fu Panda 4
In my role for Kung Fu Panda 4 and in collaboration with other developers, TDs and engineers, we modernized the DreamWorks Feather System for Kung Fu Panda 4 and The Wild Robot. My role specifically included improving user experience when designing feather lamination, feather card grooming and visualization, and building a suite of artist friendly feather shot tools for artists to move, add wind, and fluff feathers within their shots.
Trolls: Band Together
Continuing as the Character Effects Development Lead, I worked to build a number of workflow tool sets used by the Character Effects department on Trolls World Tour. I was responsible for helping to build the fur workflow that Character Effects artists used to deform and simulate the fur on the Trolls characters. I was also responsible for helping build a handful of smaller tools, such as a tetrahedral wrap system to clean up shearing geometry in Poppy’s cotton candy dress.
Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken
For this film, I took on a new role and title at Dreamworks. I was no longer a Character Effects Artist. Instead, I was promoted to Character Effects Production Development Lead. In this new role, I was responsible for assisting the artists through production by developing toolsets, solving technical problems for their shots, and assisting in building the overall pipeline for the department.
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
On this film, I was responsible for cloth and hair simulation shot work. Enjoy.
The Bad Guys
On this project, I was responsible for developing a number of the cloth rigs used for production, including a number of cloth variants for the cast of main characters and many of the generics. During my time on this project, I also developed an extension to the Dreamworks CFX pipeline to provide artists a workspace in which they could deploy our suite of procedural tools. As usual, I was also responsible for the cloth and hair in shot work.