FX Demo Reel | Luca Roediger

Particle Portal | Inspired by the Unreal Engine 5 Demo

With a blend between Pyro and Particles, this project is heavily based on the end Scene from the 2021 Unreal Engine 5 Demo.

While the incredibly talented artists at Epic Games built the portal in real-time utilizing the Unreal Engine, I had the freedom of rendering offline with Redshift. By starting this project with several Pyro simulations at its core, it was my intention to add more and smaller details to the overall shapes.

In the end, I was rendering with about 80 million particles, that are all driven by several pyro simulations to create the magical look.

Lichen Generator | Procedural Geometry

From early on, my intention was to make a tool which generates organic looking geometry. After some research and walks in the local park, I settled on lichen. Since it grows basically everywhere, I was able to get a lot of useful reference.

I achieved the main shapes with a differential growth algorithm applied to a plane, letting the Lichen literally grow out of it. For the hanging lichen, I developed a branching system and used matrix transformations for rotations and twisting.

The project is rendered in Redshift. Besides the branch which relies on textures, everything is procedurally shaded.

Building Demolition | RBD / Pyro

This project is based on the real demolition of the Western Youth Institute in Burke County. I really enjoyed the giant smoke plumes being produced in the reference, and also the interaction between the building and the smoke.

While procedurally modelling the building, I developed several tools including a custom fracturing workflow, and several tools to create all necessary constraints while always keeping the whole simulation as art directable as possible.

The smoke consists of seven individual simulations which were partitioned by a clustering tool a peer and I developed. This way, I could drastically cut down on simulation time, use PDG's in my workflow, not clutter our Render Farm at Lost Boys and simultaneously increase the voxel count and detail in the Simulations.

Right as I was finishing this project, SideFX released Houdini 19. Out of curiosity, I used Solaris and Karma to render this project. This ended up with my Instructor and myself porting parts of the Lost Boys FX Pipeline to PDG's, Solaris, Karma and developing several tools for my peers to use.