For this United Airlines project, I was tasked with designing custom cloud plates for a 90-foot LED wall inside a virtual production volume. The hero shot was a continuous 5-minute take, which required a sky environment that could evolve dynamically over time—without becoming too static or overly dense.

I built the entire system in Houdini/Solaris, leveraging USD and Python to procedurally manage and load volumetric clouds (VDBs) using frustum-based culling. This kept performance lean while allowing the skyscape to feel rich and dimensional over the extended runtime.

To ensure everything would work seamlessly in-camera, I previz’d the entire sequence in Unreal Engine, using Ultra Dynamic Sky to simulate lighting shifts and parallax. This real-time testing phase was crucial to dialing in camera motion, lensing, and environmental pacing before final delivery.