Pepto Bismol "Turducken" || Deconstruct || Flocking and Dust

This shot of the herd of turduckens flocking across the terrain presented several challenges to the CG team.  The back plate footage of the dusty plain was sourced from stock footage.  Unfortunately, the footage chosen was a bit tricky as it featured wildabeasts herding across a tree filled landscape.  The S&M flame department painted the wildabeasts out of the plate, but, because of the complexity of the geometry and coloring of the trees in the back plate, they were unable to be rotoscoped out in the same way.  To deal with this, the team recreated the trees in CG and tracked them into the footage.  The whole scene was tracked using PFTrack in order to integrate the herd of turduckens.

The team created the flocking turduckens using ICE in Autodesk Softimage.  The team wrote a bit of bespoke programming within ICE to speed and run cycle differentials within the flock and also to ensure that the turduckens managed to avoid the trees in the scene and also to avoid intersecting and colliding with each other.

One last element that the team devised to help add to the believability of the scene was the incorporation of the dust kicked up on the plain by the running turduckens.  Programming within ICE again, the team wrote a bit of code that calculated the proximity of each turducken to the ground plain.  From that, as soon as a turducken made contact with the ground, particles of dust emitted from the creatures' feet.  While the inclusion of the dust wasn't a specific request of either the director or the agency, the team felt that it was a detail that helped settle the creatures more realistically into the plate and it ultimately added a bit more drama to the scene.