The Little Mermaid

At Framestore, I modeled and optimized assets for Disney's live-action The Little Mermaid, helping keep the film's underwater world both detailed and efficient

My role combined two kinds of work. I created new assets, including a range of shiny objects, and I also cleaned up, enhanced and optimized many assets built by other artists so they could meet the demands of the production

Optimization was at the heart of the assignment. The models had to stay visually rich within the film's vast underwater environments, yet light enough for the final rendering and integration. I reduced polygon counts wherever possible while preserving the shapes and surface detail needed for the final images

To retain fine detail without relying on dense meshes, I sculpted in ZBrush and extracted displacement and normal maps, deciding carefully which details belonged in the geometry and which could be carried by the maps. I worked in Maya and ZBrush

Although my time on the project was short, it was a valuable lesson in balancing visual quality and asset efficiency on a large feature film