Joy Lookdev

The art department gave us a stack of images and told us "Like these, but not these." The development of Joy was a challenging team effort. Phillip Child tried 13 approaches in 13 weeks till we found something that seemed like the right direction, a volumetric approach. Alexis Angelidis worked his volume magic generating volume densities in Houdini.

Volume characters are challenging to light as we found out on "Partly Cloudly". To make it easier to light we shaded a standard surface and then projected that shading into the volume. We also developed a procedural that would generate sparkling dots that we scattered over the character. The points were camera facing disks that would also pull their shading from the surface.

In additional to the volume that was the main part of Joy, we added two additional "glow-y" volumes around her, a white one close to her body and a blue one whose density was based on the solid angle visibility of Joy's body mesh. In that way it would interact with props and set pieces when they obscured her. A lot of the work was in the details, like getting the inside of her mouth to look right given all these volumes all over the place.

We also had to develop a way to make her look like she was glowing while still being responsive to light. Have you ever tried to light a light bulb? Things that glow generally don't have shape, but a big part of the appeal in lighting is in the shaping. We developed a special emissive effect in the renderer that would deactivate in the presence of incoming light. This gave us a glow that played well with lighting and gave us the glow-y look. In lighting we would also use colored lights which significantly added to her look, part of the shaping came from using different hues!

We were also granted a patent on the technology we used to generate Joy's look. (US Patent #10,169,909 "Generating A Volumetric Projection For An Object")