Our work on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 involved creatively communicating some difficult yet important plot points, in a manner worthy of Kurt Russells’s larger-than-life Ego character. As well as providing technical and creative leadership for the effects team, my own work also contributed to research, effects look development, and tools.

A central component of our environments were fractals. Our brief was to create a palace that Ego had created on his home planet, with intricate complexity and a mathematical styling. I spent several weeks investigating fractals and developing tools to visualise and edit the complex generated forms, in the form of a fractal renderer built within Houdini, that generated extremely detailed 3D point clouds.

This work evolved into a full pipeline for creating usable set-pieces, which our lead modeller used to curate areas of intricate fractal geometry, extracting and manipulating selected pieces to construct the palace architecture. Our brief later expanded into creating an alien outdoor garden, for which we re-used the fractal tools to create and lay out surreal plant life.

I presented a talk about this work at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles: Building Detailed Fractal Sets for “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Another significant effect under my responsibility was Quill's celestial light which he compresses into a hilarious cosmic baseball to play catch with his dad. I developed the effect setup along with the compositing team, with various energy bursts, electric arcs, vapour trails, and sub-dermal tissue lighting combined together for the final result.

Additional publicity:

• Art of VFX
• FX Guide
  

I described some of the technical details behind this work at SideFX software's 'Houdini Hive' sessions at SIGGRAPH 2017: https://vimeo.com/228370204