Island Creation for Inside Out
Island creation effects was one of my first major contributions for the movies at Pixar.
The main idea was to use SDF (Signed Distance Field) to modify geometries, which is more flexible than the traditional blend shape based methodes. The use of SDF was not popular at that time because of the limitation of computing power since it requires pretty high resolution of volumetric data, but fortunately, the island was made of multiple parts and relatively far from the camera, so I was able to get around the limitations.
This shot was done relatively late in the production because of the story change. I mostly just copied the setups that I made for Hockey Island. However, this is probably one of the most memorable shots for me. Inside Out was my first Pixar movie that I worked on, so I went to the theater near my place at the opening day, and since I had watched the movie many times (literally 12 times), I was mostly watching the people, and this shot was close to the ending, so many people were crying. I cannot claim people were crying because of my shot, but still I was so happy that I contributed to this movie.