Worms

[torresmedia]

Besides beening a discusting movie, it was really good! :P Hehe...

[JLipscomb]

Yeah, same goes for me. It's pretty cool as far as animation, lighting, etc. But it's pretty gross. So, nice job!

[sconlogue]

Yeah, same goes for me. It's pretty cool as far as animation, lighting, etc. But it's pretty gross. So, nice job!

Ya, that was pretty much the only guideline they had, that is be as gross as possible. Though this is nothing compared to some of the reference I had to study... Horrible horrible things I have seen. Though once you've been staring at this stuff long enough, you'll just sit there eating lunch, going through some of the nastiest photos you can imagine and it doesn't even phase you.

[Canadianboy]

haha awesome work man! How did you go about animating the worms?

[sconlogue]

Thanks Canadianboy,

I had created a basic worm rig using spline IK for some shots of an individual worm, but then they added this shot where they wanted a bunch of worms (20 or so) moving around, interacting with each other as they slide down the intestine wall. So I had to dump the IK rig and figure something else out.

In the end I did a rope sim (Splines with Rope Modifier set to width of the worm) in reactor with some variable wind and very very low friction. Before running the sim I skin my worm mesh to the spline then array the spline randomly and run the sim. It worked exactly the way I wanted with much less messing around then I thought and the wind created just the right amount of ambient motion.

[dude5487]

Thats so creepy! I like it :).

My first question was gonna be about the worm rig set up but thats already been answered. Given that, can you talk a bit about the stomach lining? Was a sculpting program used to create the rough surface?

[sconlogue]

Thanks Dude,

Actually both the intestine and worms rely heavily on Mental Ray displacement. Both are a mixture of hand painted and procedural maps. The mesh itself is rather simple and smooth. Here is the Ambient Occlusion pass which demonstrates the displacement better.
http://www.isclient.com/cgtalk/AODisplaceDV.jpg (http://www.isclient.com/cgtalk/AODisplace720p.jpg)

Here is a breakdown:

http://www.isclient.com/cgtalk/meshDV.jpg (http://www.isclient.com/cgtalk/mesh720p.jpg)

As you can see the mesh is pretty simple, so it is all in the shading. I suppose I could have gone into ZBrush, created the look I want and export my mapping and displacement back into Max. Not being a ZBrush guy doing it by hand just seemed easier.

The two shaders:
Worms: Fass SSS SKIN+DISPLACE
Intestine: ArchiDesign with dispalce and bump.

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