The Ruins is a horror movie about man eating plants. Because making plants eat people is unethical VFX was employed to make the vines come to life.
This was a pretty complex task of creating a system that allowed a mixture of animation performance and dynamics simulation for a large number of objects. Then adding the look and feel approriate to randomise and specify a leaf size and age to suit the shot lead to animation and rendering system that was robust enough to support all the possible permutations.
This part of the project was taken place in the remote office in Sydney and Adelaide was bought on board late in the project.
Setting up the technology for animation, dynamics and rendering had a few teething issues that I helped take care of.
Then I moved onto the role of lighting shots for temp and for final.
Apart from the CGI vines there was a lot of work with compositing gore effects.
