Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)

Ice Age: The Meltdown was on a fast track. We had to come up with many creative solutions to create a melting world with all kind of fluid effects. We wrote many custom code and tools during the production. Here are some of the effects I worked on:

This was the very first bubble shot in the production. I worked with R&D and Lighting to iron out techniques for under water rendering.

I designed and animated all the bubbles in these shots. they are carefully choreographed with characters:




This is the first fur-related effect in the production, where the Crash takes off, but its fur remains behind. A very cartoonish effect. There were many unknowns on how to control fur to do this. I spent about an month on this shot.


I also developed the Campfire effect in this film. It has lights attached to the particles, so it illuminates the objects around them realistically:



Dust are usually subtle. You want to feel it without paying attention to it.



Flood was one of the most complicate effect in the film. It consists so many different elements:

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Water noise is another frequent-used technique in this movie. It uses layers of procedure bump to bring life to calm water surfaces:


I also did some early tests during the pre-production stage:

a simple stylized water curtain for small background waterfall:


developed a technique for instancing pre-animated splashes based on character's foot penetrations:


this is a cute little proof-of-concept test for floating leaves on a river. I used a river flow sim R&D originally developed for adding bump noise on water surface to drive leaves:


I prototyped the first bird nest and handed off to Set Dressing department:




i did some early wet fur tests and developed tools for animators to setup wet fur:



this was a look-development for stylized campfire smoke, not used in the production: