Rebelway FX Challenge

Final Submission

This is my final submission. Through this contest, I could learn a lot and enjoy creating FX. Also, I realized what is necessary for me to make better visual effects. I appreciate the people who held this challenge.

Rendering and Compositing

I finished rendering the whole scene and composited it briefly. The deadline is coming up soon, so I will do what I can do.

Environment

I created a procedural conveyor setup. It is easy to change its path because its shape is based on one NURBS curve. 

All of the shaders used in this project are created procedurally without texture.

Scraps

I put an old TV at the top of the scraps. The robot, the main character, came to this scrap yard to watch TV for pursuing human legacies.  FYI, the TV shows a video which I took during my trip two years ago. 

Energy Charge

In this scene, the humanoid distorts space and extracts a small sphere (that is the thing like a gravitational singularity).

I used vellum simulation to create the distorted space field and the squishy sphere. But I felt just adjusting parameters for those simulations takes a lot of time to get good motion. Therefore I combined results of vellum simulations and animated geometry.

The motions of small scraps and stones absorbed by the sphere are created with RBD simulation. At first, I struggled to set up for the simulation that they would draw beautiful motion paths. However, actually, controlling a bunch of force fields was complicated and time-consuming. So, I made motions that objects emit from the sphere and then retimed them for moving backward. Smoke is created in a similar way as well.

Energy Explosion

I combined some particle simulations and animation to make this shot. I simulated a rough swirling particle motion firsthand. After that, I run another particle simulation using the result of it as a velocity field. I tried to make it look like a galaxy.

Shield FX

Particle simulations are mainly used in this scene. Some of them are controlled with the velocity volume inherited from pyro simulations. Also, I combined RBD solver and pop solver to create the motion for the orange small triangle fractures.

Sand

The sand is generated with vellum grains. They are classified into groups of the chunk so that they look like wet sand. In the post process, I picked out some vellum particles and replaced them with small stones that have variations in shape and size.

Trash

There are two kinds of trash; plastic debris and electric wires. Both of them are generated procedurally, which means those shapes and sizes are varied automatically. They are handled by vellum cloth and hair simulation.

Scrap Metal 

I created three types of scrap metals; boards, bars, and tires. Boards and bars are bent randomly so that they look like more scrap. Tires have two variations; wheel and tire, or wheel only.

 In the RBD simulation of these scraps, the result of the sand simulation is used as colliders. If all of those vellum particles were treated as static objects, rigid bodies would be a messier result. Therefore the particles that went not so far from their rest position are only handled as colliders, while the other particles are ignored.