Mandelbrotting the set

The Mandelobrot sets within the film are dream-like, kaleidoscopic interior shots which fold the environments, pulling them apart and re-configuring in complicated patterns around the characters. Because of the quantity of movement within the whole set, nearly everything needed to be animated; even if the team didn’t strictly need to animate a prop, they had to make it available to the animators in case certain surrounding elements within the scene needed to move in a different way. Led by Animation Supervisor Nathan McConnel a new pipeline was introduced, whereby the animation team was set up with a rigging tool of their own. Says McConnel, ‘We designed a new workflow to create a toolbox for the animator, incorporating all levels of movement and pivots. The animators were able to rig everything themselves, and had the power to duplicate the geometry if needed.’

‘There’s the whole set bending and moulding, cloning and reconfiguring itself, but then there’s also the Mandelbrot pattern, which is the mathematical formula that creates these crazy patterns and adds the fractured world aspect to it’, adds Wilson. ‘Once we had animated all of these assets, our FX team then placed additional Mandelbrot sponge fractal patterns inside it, using Houdini to drive a proprietary Arnold procedural iso surface shader at render time to give us a mathematical organic growth. That was really cool; it was all new to us!’