"Zathura" (2005). Generalist TD at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

For this film I was tasked to construct, animate, sim, light, render a depiction of Saturn with almost ice like asteroid fields embedded in Saturn's rings. In the story the house spins into space with the kids trapped inside. The live-action craftsman house was filmed somewhere in Los Feliz or Pasadena. A miniature house was constructed and lit with several passes on a motion control rig that would then be taken into digital to sit in with the CG. The asteroid/ring field is comprised of thousands of instanced geometry created in Maya along with a simple ring geometry to blend into. For the planet itself, Jon Favreau wanted some fluid moving interest. So I did Maya fluid sims rendered out flat at a high-res and constructed a huge 8k map in Shake of multiple blends of the fluid sims. It's very subtle in the final shots because you don't want to blow scale. This was all rendered deploying MTOR and Renderman. Ryan Laney did some additional dust passes that are blowing off the rocks. Kurt Judson did the spit coming out of the kid's mouth. Thelvin Cabezas put the finishing touches on these shots in the comp. It was over 6 months of work for me with iterations and time consuming speed changes in the rock simulations. Enjoy.