One short-lived character in Ice Age 3 is the “Mist Monster”, a hazy exaggerated memory of Buck’s arch-nemesis “Rudy”. Blue Sky has done volumetric work in the past, but with a technique that quickly broke down. For this new character they developed a new technique based on Maya.
For this movie they took advantage of Maya’s compressible fluids and set up all of the dust, snow powder, mist, and the entire sequence of the Mist Monster using what Blue Sky calls SmaugVox, smog in a voxel system. “We gained two things. One was with Mayas’
fluid system, we were able to run simulations. We made a series of tools to determine the contact between the geometry and the ground and packaged it for the FX TD’s so they could run sims using Mayas’ rendered feedback to see what it would look like, then exported the density and velocity information to bin files that we would convert into voxels for our proprietary software.”
