Visual Effects "The Castle"

"The Castle"

So this is my fx work “The Castle” which is 1440 frames long (1min) where I managed to learn various aspects of Effects mainly to say proceduralism. As a kid I was very fascinated by how things appear magically and slowly I realized that magic is called Visual Effects on screen, so as I started learning more about it, procedurally generating something caught my attention so I always wanted to do something like this.

Little did I know the struggles behind such effects, it was smooth initially but as time passed I started getting into problems like errors in VEX code, methods which are not efficient, too much time-consuming, rendering issues, camera fixes, aesthetic choices, etc. So after a few months of troubleshooting and struggling, I have finally managed to achieve it.

The softwares that I have used are Houdini, Maya, Nuke, and Davinci 

Breakdown

- Fully procedurally generated castle
- Flowers made with procedural line growth and find shorted path
- The grass is procedurally generated and controlled using Point VOP, randomized height, and thickness of each strand of grass.
- There is pyro and rbd to add in details and fill up the shot.
- For the roof, a set of tiles are animated and given an id, and have to randomize their order and offset the animation using a VEX code.
- Vellum Simulation has been used for the flag and the banner.
- All of it has been rendered in Houdini mantra with multiple Render passes to further manipulate them if required.
- Compositing done in Nuke.

Steps Generation

Cloth Simulation

WIP Shot