Soul (2020)

I joined the art team on Soul during early production and was able to explore look-development ideas for parts of the Soul world. I started experimenting with writing ray-marching code in both Autodesk Maya and our own in-house GLSL editor to come up with design ideas for the Astral Plane and the Great Beyond. I was able to show live interactive demos to the Director and Production Designer and make changes to the look at their request; it was a really rewarding experience for me and helped refine my graphics coding immensely (More of this work can be seen here: https://roebots.art/pages/work). After working in the art team for a few months I moved back into sets where I continued look-development before beginning to translate some of the concepts I'd been developing into practical elements we could render in the film. This included adding particles to the hills, as well as adding some custom OSL shaders for the terrain shading. These nodes were ray-marched fractal noise, swirling pathways for the terrain, and voronoi cells which got used throughout most of the Soul world. I also went about translating some of the custom grass shading and animation effects from the GLSL grass into OSL for our custom moss/grass/fuzz procedurals.