Wormhole Sequence

I. Substance Designer 2D Sequence
Table of Contents: II. 3D Models & Shaders I. Substance Designer 2D Sequence V. Exporting a 360° Image Sequence
Adjustments were made to the glass shader in order to fine tune the reflections and refractions on the helmet in front and behind Sandy's head.

SamplerInfo nodes plugged into ramps helped mask different reflective and refraction attributes. Clip Start and Clip End (MASH Curve node) I was responsible for creating the Wormhole sequence and the animated lights on Sandy, in the Kamp Koral episode, Hat's Off to Space.

This breakdown will show the steps I took to create and animate the sequence (minus the character).

Character Animation: by Technicolor, overseen by Animation Supervisor, Joe Mandia
Final Comp: by Comp Supervisor, Katie Reihman ← Previous VI. Render and Comp Next → A single Float Attribute drove the animation via exposed functions on multiple nodes. Images were exported as individual png's from Designer and compiled in Nuke. I hand animated each of these drawings flying past the camera, matching to the final storyboard. The Lines are polygonal cylinders with rounded caps. Sprinkled in are few blue, green, and yellow squares/rectangles. These were shaped and colored to match the final storyboards.

Redshift emission for ambient glow. WORMHOLE SEQUENCE Breakdown These shapes were instanced and animated with Maya's MASH, utilizing the Curve node. The 2D drawings (provided by the Art Team) that fly by the camera are planes with 2D drawings used as opacity masks for an emissive shader. III. MASH Rig Warm colors close to camera, cool colors further from camera.
IV. Hand Animated Elements IV. Hand Animated Elements V. Exporting a 360 HDRI Sequence
At this moment, I got the idea of illuminating Sandy with the animated rig much like Gene Wilder in the rowboat scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Since this wasn't present in the script or storyboard, I'd share my results with the show runners, Mark, and Vince to see if they liked the addition. To light Sandy I could use high emissive values on the existing mesh shaders or, what I was more interested in trying was to, generate my own animated Dome Light from the animated rig.

A camera was placed just behind Sandy's eyes.
The frayed lines that appear and form into a singular line was done in Designer, utilizing the Shape Splatter node with the single line as the input pattern.
III. MASH Rig II. 3D Models & Shaders
Camera type was set to "Spherical" (found in Redshift dropdown in the Attribute Editor). spherical camera render frames A high resolution like 8192x4096 was exported to hold up as a background plate, in the reflections and refractions.

The exported image sequence was then plugged into 3 different Dome Lights, via the texture input. Mapped to sphere for visual example a. Illuminates Sandy
b. Controls Reflections
c. Controls Refractions The result of the spherical output plugged into Dome Lights: Once the singular black line has formed, it expands out toward the left and right edges of the screen, leaving a white line where the black line once was, eroding as it spreads.

That process was handled by the node tree seen below:
VI. Render and Comp At this point, I handed off the wormhole shots to the Animation Supervisor, Joe Mandia to adjust any of the animation and to apply/finalize any needed secondary animation.

Once animation was approved, I worked with the Comp Supervisor, Katie Reihman, where she applied things like glow, chromatic aberration and lens effects. For the close up of Sandy, camera shake was applied in comp. That sums up the entire process of creating the Wormhole sequence. It was an assignment I was eager to work on had fun with along the way.

You can see the final sequence in the episode shot below:
As the sequence comes to the end, the camera rolls onto it's side, the various colored lines recede behind camera as red and white lines overtake the camera.

The Red and the white lines each had their own MASH network, so they could be individually controlled when animating. This outputs a 360° Image that can map to a Dome Light. A float slider drove the random position and rotation. The input curves were skinned with Joints and rigged with Controls to try various shapes for the instances to travel. The Clip Start attribute on the MASH Curve node was used to animate the instances starting far camera and then travel toward and past camera.