Dory, a forgetful blue tang, is living happily in the reef with Marlin and Nemo when Dory suddenly remembers that she has a family out there who may be looking for her. With Marlin and Nemo by her side, she reaches a marine institute where she was raised. Separated from her friends, Dory enlists the help of Hank, a grumpy “septopus", Bailey, a beluga whale who is convinced his biological sonar skills are on the fritz, and Destiny, a nearsighted whale shark. As she pieces together her past, Dory discovers her parents never stopped looking for her. Reunited, she learns that her quirks are her strength.
This innovative tool was used to capture Hank’s extreme flexibility in a way that had never been achieved before. It allows his body to squash, stretch, and flow naturally around the environment, creating movement that feels both organic and believable. When animators adjust a single tentacle, the system automatically makes the rest of the octopus react giving the idea of a boneless and almost jelly-like body.
It automates movements in the way that when Hank's tentacles move they would move other parts of his body as well. A new type of curve was used for the tentacles to move the octopus so that animators could grab any part of him and move the rest of the body correctly and automatically. The hardest part in the creation of this tool was semplifying the complexity of interaction between Hank and the environment.
A pre-sim script calculated the snapping and release of the suckers based on distance to a surface and this gave animators controls to easily modify the resulting simulation. The results were then used as an input target pose to the PhysBAM volumentric simulation. A combination of hard and soft constraint forces were used to target the input sucker shapes and to resolve self collision amongst suckers.
