Matthew Benson
Technical Director
Introduction
For the movie Incredibles 2 a character named Voyd was introduced who had the power to make teleportation portals. These portals allowed characters or objects to jump from one place to another instantaneously. This effect was faked by having two characters in the scene at all times, and then transitioning between the two. This was a big undertaking that required coordination across multiple departments from Animation to Rendering to Simulation.

Role

The Simulation department was concerned because, this essentially meant that any sculpting or adjustments to character garments on one character they would need to be done twice, and there was no easy way to copy sculpting work from one asset to another. I was asked to create a set of tools to help artists overcome this limitation.
The Toolset
The toolset I developed allowed artists to select a character that they wanted to synchronize and then click a button that triggered a program which would look through the entire scene file to find any adjustments that the artist had made related to the two copies of the character. If it found any discrepancies, it would transfer them onto the other copy, and adjust for any world/local space adjustments and copy the latest changes. This allowed our simulation artists to work so quickly that the animation department actually reached out to see if they could use the same script for animating the characters through the portals.
