Working with Colin Doncaster at Rising Sun Pictures , Christos Obretenov helped develop the 3D CG corn fields in Superman Returns where the young Superman is learning to fly.

Superman Returns Demo Reel from christos obretenov on Vimeo.

Corn fields with ambient winds

(click for full res)

The corn fields are procedurally generated and animated in Houdini, with the shaders created in Renderman/3Delight. Each corn stalk starts with the leaf geometry imported into Houdini, where we have 7 different kinds of leaves, that are randomly selected and rotated around a stalk to create the entire corn plant. The flowers on top of the plant are also procedurally generated from Houdini and placed on top of the plant. Each plant itself is randomly rotated and scaled while placed on a ground plane grid. Every procedural leaf and plant saves a unique ID into the RIB file so the surface shader can vary the shading over the entire field, including individual leaf age and color variation, as well as roughness of the specular model.

Corn field wake as Superman runs through

(click for full res)

For the wind wake following our young Superman, Christos setup a sequence of Metaball and magnet operations to push the wake out and back in in an alternating pattern. This magnet affected just the plant stalks, and the leaves were procedurally generated on the stalks and thus also followed the wake pattern.

Houdini scene layouts (click for full res)

Christos Obretenov,

2009