1. Introduction
A. Subject matter: Large scale slides of small objects/masses which overwhelm and carry characters. It's always fascinating to watch when countless pieces of rubble or debris
B. Examples
1) Toy Story 3; the Incinerator scene
In this scene Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the toys fall into a pit with an incinerator in the middle amongst great amounts of crushed and chopped up garbage, being carried by the flow of garbage.
2) Star Trek (the Original Series) Episode 15, season 2, the Trouble with Tribbles
Avalanche of Tribbles that fall out of the storage hatch which once contained grain buries Kirk in many tiny tribble bodies.
2. Toy Story Incineration Scene
A. "Pixar VFX artists treated each item of trash as an individual particle that could be procedurally animated using Houdini particle networks." They then wrote in codes that produced several more "trash particles" around each individually manipulated trash so that manipulating one particle would affect many others when they were near the
- This is what made what appeared to be millions of individually moving pieces of trash on the sides of the incinerator pit.
- Pixar hand created all of the trash that came in direct contact with the characters
- Shading and single-flow animations used for mid and background garbage.
3. "The Trouble with Tribbles", Star Trek, ToS, s2e15.
- thousands of tribbles created and stored in a bottom-opening storage area
- hatch opened so that all of the tribbles with tumble downwards
- Additional tribbles continue to be tossed down from above to give the illusion that the room was packed to well past capacity.
- Majority of the tribbles were not shown as falling, but having fallen into a specific set-up (around Kirk)
4. Conclusion:
- Avalanches are very interesting visually, good for story arcs where the characters need to be overwhelmed or caught up in a situation
- Animated sequences need a lot of tricks to create what looks like a many-itemed flow but which has as few complicated or directly controllable pieces as possible
- Hand-crafted items are best if pushed into the front or done off-screen in order to give the sense that a lot more happened/fell than was actually created.
Cited resource pages:
Side FX.com: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1967&Itemid=68
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