The Muppet's Wizard of Oz

As Lead 3D Artist on the Muppet's Wizard Of Oz movie, Markus directed a team to create shaders, lighting and animation for the multiple incarnations of the wizard in his throne room.

For more info about the movie, check out The Muppets site.

Markus created the shaders for these 3 incarnations of the Wizard of Oz. The feather shader and fire head effect required special innovations to achieve the level of quality required for the Muppets movies.

Tech Notes

Henson Studios provided untextured models, and mocap data from puppeteer rigs.

Markus wrote utilities for editing and cleanup of the puppet rig mocap data.

He also created texture maps and particle effects, lit the characters and rendered them for compositing.

The chicken model arrived from Henson Studios with all the feathers but no UV layout! Markus wrote a script to dismantle the chicken and generate multiple UV sets so that each feather could share common data and yet still be unique from all the other feathers on the bird.

The clip below is an example of Markus's texture painting and lighting on the Wizard.