Large scale foliage animation for The Ruins
Carsten Kolve, Christoph Sprenger, Malcolm Humphreys, Fred Chapman · 2008
Carnivorous vines with an appetite for teenagers are the main digital characters in Dreamworks' The Ruins. Animating thousands of leaves and flowers attached to these vines posed a unique challenge – not only did they have to sway, collide and react to external forces in a believable way but at times they were also required to perform in very “un-plantlike” ways. While background leaves were realised using a dynamic hair approach, leaves in the mid and foreground (of which there could be up to 850) needed to be more controllable. In this sketch we present the animation pipeline developed for this type of foliage: a modular control rig system that allowed layering of skeletal deformation derived from procedural- and key-framing techniques. We also show how the results of soft body simulation were incorporated into this work flow.