Ink Rendering in Brutal Legend

This video shows the ink rendering technology I developed for Brutal Legend with our graphics and animation teams. Ink was quite a challenge for us as Ophelia's character is in a constant state of flux between fluid ink and her solid form. The final technique involved rendering the ink to a low-res buffer and performing some thresholding operations on it to extract the most interesting details (seen in the debug mode at the end of the video). Although it is taken in a graybox room, this is the same effect used in the shipping title. See the Brutal Legend VFX Presentation from GDC 2010 for more details

This video shows the ink rendering technology we developed for Brutal Legend. Ink was quite a challenge for us as Ophelia's character is in a constant state of flux between fluid ink and her solid form. She also needed to attack aggressively creating ink stabbing weapons, as well as have an underwater, smooth flowing motion to the ink's behavior. The final technique involved rendering the ink to a low res buffer and performing some thresholding operations to it to extract the most interesting details.

The first sequence is regular particles driven by curl noise. After the first wipe it shows the raw "ink buffer". After the 3rd wipe it shows the final, thresholded ink rendering.