VFX for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is out in theaters now (I saw it today, great film) and contains a host of fun food effects,  Popular Mechanics sits down with the crew at Sony Imageworks to get the details on how to properly animate falling hamburgers.

“It was fun to do,” Bredow says, “but it wasn’t what we wanted them to look like in the movie.” VFX artists opted to create a stylized version of the cheeseburgers using a physics simulation with invisible springs that held some of the burgers together when they hit the ground. For the ones that broke apart, animators had to create digital versions of lettuce, pickles, cheese, buns and burgers that had all the characteristics of their real-life counterparts.

via VFX for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 3D – Photo-Real Food Effects in 3D – Popular Mechanics.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .