Set in Element City, where Fire-, Water-, Earth- and Air-residents live togetherElemental introduces Ember, a tough, quick-witted and fiery young woman, whose friendship with a fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow guy named Wade challenges her beliefs about the world they live in.
In Elemental, Ember’s design required an expressive and constantly shifting fire simulation. Pixar introduced Volumetric Neural Style Transfer, a motion innovation that allowed her flames to carry emotional nuance rather than behave like standard fire effects. This technique applied stylized motion directly to volumetric data, giving Ember fluid, character-driven movement while preserving the physical qualities of fire. The result was a performance where her flames could subtly reflect mood, intensity, and personality in every shot.
By using more gaseous and languid pyro simulations as input, higher frequency “cusp and curve” shapes could be coherently transferred to the volumes via GPU based optimization process applying recent advances in neural style transfer (NST) to the voxels themselves. A key benefit of this process was the final shape of the fire was decoupled from the underlying simulation. This allowed the simulation to focus on lower frequency motions and stability, while NST could provide the final touches of shaping, particularly around the silhouette.
