Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1203639
D E PA R T M E N T 27 KEYFRAME SPRING 2020 27 We would have to go in and manually adjust things like speed and timing and certain displacements…We incorporated 'hang time' into our water and lava splash motion and would often cut to the next scene as the splash was at its apex." In another climatic scene, the Hard Rock army bursts out of the water and splashes real lava but in our silk reference and art we wanted to achieve a more natural silk look and also feel less threatening to our trolls," says Wood. "To achieve this, we took the underlying lava fluid simulation, traced a subset of points back in time to create flow curves, then created a force per curve that was perpendicular to the cloth surface and blended that force with the original lava flow direction. Essentially this gave us flow curves that blew wind up at the cloth surface while still giving the sense of movement that would give us a little bit of lapping and creasing." Imagining an organza river or a silk sputtering volcano is one thing—the process to take it from a visual development concept to an effective solution onscreen takes years and there is a certain amount of faith required alongside artistry and technical acumen. "You have to just believe that it's possible because you don't know until you're there, honestly," says Cronkhite Shaindlin. "It's also what makes us as a crew, excited. It's such a new, big challenge and it's exciting to see it come together in such an amazing way. "You have to just believe that it's possible because you don't know until you're there, honestly... It's also what makes us as a crew, excited. It's such a new, big challenge and it's exciting to see it come together in such an amazing way." through the surface of the ocean. "Everybody in surfacing, effects, the art department, Kendal and myself, we all brainstormed how that would look, if you're to break through the surface of water [and] it was just layers of fabric," says Lamb. The resulting solution was to use torn fabric, fibers and glitter to imitate a splash. "A lot of that water feel comes from the material that is assigned to those individual pieces of fabric…light plays off of [the] pieces, lots of glinting, like you would [see] with a watery splash," says Wood. The Hard Rock trolls live in a volcano that evokes a subterranean feel and features denim, leather, fishnets plus lots of studs and zippers. "It's all red and black and there's a lot of exploding lava. It's intense and it's Hard Rock music but because the exploding lava is actually silk with glitter, it's kind of charming," adds Cronkhite Shaindlin. Exploding silk lava from denim padded volcanoes set the stage for the effects team's work. "Initially, we produced a cloth surface that had a lot of flow properties of Courtesy of NBCUniversal/DreamWorks Animation