Mud – Swamp of Despondency

One of the most challenging scenes in the film, the development of the mud took significantly longer than initially expected. I began developing the look of the simulated mud in Houdini 15 and working on scene layout and shading development in Arnold. We then outsourced the mud sim to a 3rd party but after multiple test rounds and not seeing the results we wanted, we hired Jason Leandro, a full-time Houdini artist, to join our team to create the final mud that you see in the VFX breakdown reel.

While we were shot finaling this scene, we were requested to migrate renderers from Arnold to Redshift. We had to re-build the scene layout and all shaders a few weeks after lighting artists began finaling.

I was personally responsible for the following:

• Lookdev
• Initial FLIP sims
• Technical, artistic development for look of mud
• xGen grass and procedural instancing of plants
• Mud bubbles and mud ‘churn’ shader

All final simulations in film were crafted and executed in Houdini by Jason Leandro.