Mr. X did many of the VFX shots in upcoming “Amelia”, a movie about famour female avaiator Amelia Earhart, and has published a new Case Study on their website about how they created the clouds used in many of the flying shots.
The first step in the cloud shot pipeline was blocking. The previz team created cloud layouts in Maya using placeholder spheres that would represent the cloudbanks from the sequence style frames. Cameras were also animated during this stage and any gaps in the cloudbanks were filled with additional placeholders.
Once blocking was complete, the spheres were replaced with polygonal models matching the desired profiles of the clouds. When these were approved, the surface shapes were passed on to the VFX team to be converted into true volumetrics.
“The VFX team’s first step was to bring the polygon clouds into Houdini and voxelize them,” said Price. “Then procedural volume shaders were used to provide finer detail by modifying the density within each cloud.”
