RIG.B

An astounding journey

The challenge has been a great experience, I was able to explore a wide variety of effects, from rigid bodies and Pyro simulations to procedural animation.

It also taught me about optimizing the storytelling to get an efficient shot for this short duration, avoiding long sequences without impact. Moreover, comping the different layers and color grading them was a great occasion to understand the look development to enhance the shot.

I'm glad I completed this project and hope you'll like it as much as I enjoyed doing it! 

Thanks a lot to The Rookies for the opportunity and the Autodesk team for providing the model of RIG.B!

After rendering the different elements, I could comp the layers of the shots.

Thanks to the crypto matte AOV that helped mask parts, the assets have been rendered fully without a matte. This allowed me to work on the entire layer without obstruction by mattes.

The ripple effect of the shield is created by distorting the background with the UV pass of the geometry.

The shading of RIG.B was a fun journey, and even if all the work will not be seen, I didn’t want to rush this process, as I wanted to work up every detail at best.

For the rendering, I chose Arnold for its advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer that helped quickly get realistic results, leaving more time for iterations. Fortunately, the model was provided with UVs. That avoids a lot of pain and allows going straight ahead to the shading stage.

We'll see the robot in a chase scene where he struggles to flee his opponents. To represent that, I tried to achieve the look of a dirty and used metal shader inside Houdini. The procedural nature of the shader allowed me to iterate fast and try different techniques before getting the right look.

The layout plays a huge role in defining the scene's mood, even if the challenge focuses on the FX of the shot. The idea was the set would be more supportive of the story and not be the focal point. This helps the readability of the short sequence.

With all the assets in place and simulations synchronized, I can now go to the shading phase. Mainly for the robot that is the focus of the scene.

The second step in the destruction was the missile explosion.
It combines three simulations (the core, the trails, and the ground shockwave).

I used the previous RBD Simulation of the robot as a collision to add more interaction to the pyro sim. Then the result was retimed at 20% of its original speed.

As touched earlier, my reference was the robot's destruction in Elysium. For this effect, I took advantage of a falling animation from mixamo to give the robot a fluid feel to its motion. The animation rolls for the 4 first frames, then the RBD simulation takes over.

Thanks to the detailed model provided for the challenge, I didn't need to simulate 'false' debris falling off the robot: all of them are pieces detached from their initial place.

Knowing that the robot's chest was not filled, I added a secondary sim with some of the pieces. This helped represent the pieces inside the robot, adding more detail to the simulation.

Revamp

After receiving some feedback, I reworked the wall destruction setup. Indeed the previous version needed more work to feel more realistic. I included some notes in the breakdown video.

Sparks and Impact

To create the bullet's impacts and the sparks on the robot, I scattered points in areas that were not behind the shield. They served two goals: trigger sources for the particle simulation and create the impacts on the robot body.

For the sparks, 40 particles are quickly ejected with a short lifespan. Then with the SparkTrail SOP, some trails are split to add more detail.
Randomly shaped spheres are copied onto the points. Then their spot color is transferred to the robot's body to create the impacts. The color attribute will be used in the shading phase to make some parts of the surface scratched, making the raw metal underneath appear.

Sonar

For the look of the impact on the shield, I was inspired by The Dark Knight sequence in which he uses his spy vision to locate hostages.

The effect is created by timeshifting an animated sphere on each impact. I created a solver that detects the frame at which the impact happens and then is used to shift the animation.
The color of the sphere is transferred into the proxy geometry of the shield scattered with a bunch of points (50,000 to have enough detail) to get the 'echo effect'.

RBD

Since the deadline is short, the setup for the destruction has to be simple enough for me to iterate fast.

The wall consists of 2 layers of concrete and one layer made of bricks. By combining different materials, the destruction will be more detailed and emphasize the strength of the robot.

On the simulation side, having a low-resolution geometry helped get the desired look and behavior quickly without having a huge network of constraints. Then, I could simulate detail on the breaking parts of the clusters with high-resolution geometry.

Dust

Point emission sources of dust are generated from the separating fractured pieces. To get a more realistic behavior, the particles are advected by the smoke simulation.

Smoke

The smoke is generated from two streams: the concrete and the bricks. The two sources have a color field based on the material that it comes from. This way, the smoke doesn't have a unique color, and its shape is more defined due to the mix of colors.

For the smoke to get a nice roll when the wall pieces fall and touch the ground, I cached the velocity field of the RBD and the robot.
Note: Smoke will be simulated again with higher resolution.

Layout

At this step, I started searching for a little story that could fit in an 8s sequence to avoid having too long scenes.

The goal was for the layout and FX to put the emphasis on the robot while remaining readable in this short time space.

My references for the shot were Levi's ad "Odyssey" for the wall destruction and the robot destruction scene from the Elysium movie.