Pacific Rim: The Black

• Type // Main Title Sequence
• Role // 3D, Particles, Animation, & Compositing
• Year // 2021
• Award // Bronze Clio

I was part of the team to build and animate the intro for Netflix's Pacific Rim: The Black, a Japanese-American joint anime about giant robots defending Australia from giant monsters.

I did a lot of the 3D heavy lifting: creating and animating 3D elements, texturing, rigging, posing, and rendering the final 3D graphics. I also did all the particle simulations for the ink and fire that envelop the characters and city, as well as a bit of lighting and compositing.

I did dozens of simulations in X-Particles to get the look of the ink just right. The ink had to convincingly flow around the characters and follow the camera, yet not distract or take visual importance away from them. Physics like surface tension ended up being used on top of fractal-based turbulent motion and gravity to make the particles flow properly, while the motion of the ink itself was accomplished by animating an invisible emitter over a spline path.

After I did the complex motion of the ink, the fire was relatively easier to figure out. In order to save on simulating-caching time, a single section of fire was built and cached, so it could be duplicated all over the city. Unlike the ink which was skinned with polygons to make it solid, the fire was left as pure particles to make it more gaseous.

I modelled eyelids for this monster's eye and animated them, inspired by multilayered lizard eyelids. The evil inky smoke emitting from the eye was a last minute addition, done after finding just the right computer simulation at 3am in the morning. I didn't want to settle for a 2D element of fading the screen to black plastered over top of the characters; I wanted it to be true 3D and actually envelop the characters in 3D space. Similar to the fire, in order to save calculation time only one or two tendrils of inky smoke were built and animated. They were then baked as alembics and duplicated to fill the whole screen.

Credits

• Agency // The Refinery
• Head of Motion Graphics // Stewart Hopewell
• Design, 3D, Animation, & Compositing // Devin Ballard
• 3D, Particles, Animation, & Compositing // Tom Bloczynski
• Additional 3D & Animation // Jordan Montreuil
• Additional 3D // Clayton Glenn