Procedural Techniques for Large, Dynamic Sets in Elemental

Aylwin Villanueva, Mike Ravella, Brandon Montell, Ting Zhang, Hosuk Chang

Abstract:

The world of Pixar's film Elemental is inhabited by characters made of fire, water, air and earth, and we needed to give these characters a home that was just as dynamic as they were. Specifically, we needed to build a city with new and distinct forms of architecture for each element, fill this city with fire, water, smoke and vegeta- tion, and add animation to make everything feel alive in the way a bustling city should. In this talk, we present our techniques for handling problems of scale, such as parameterized building generation and dressing, application of a variety of fx elements within large sets, as well as some novel approaches for automated color palette generation, both in an asset and shot context.

Paper (PDF)

SIGGRAPH Talks 2023