Earth, Water and Fire

The King

This is my most recent project in the VFX master's degree. We had 3 weeks to learn grooming from scratch while we simultaneously developed a personal project that was based on what we were learning and that would be delivered at the end of these 3 weeks. This is what I came up with.

They gave us a choice between 15 animated animal assets and we could do whatever we wanted with them. I chose this wonderful lion from ziva dynamics. I started looking for reference images and came across a Smithsonian Channel documentary called "Desert warriors: Lions of the Namib" I was fascinated by the idea that there were lions in the desert walking among the sand dunes, so I decided to try to recreate it.

I started by creating the environment using highfields and playing with the erosion and vein parameters to achieve the sand dunes look. Afterwards, I set up the camera animation, to achieve the documentary look that I was going for, I realized that I had to use a telephoto lens as these shots are usually taken from a great distance. I chose a 500mm lens.

Then I started grooming the lion. First of all, I painted on the geometry different attributes as masks that would later be used to control both the guides and the generation of hair.

I simulated the grooming guides and everything started to work but I felt something was missing. The sand. I started to think about the best way to approach the simulation of vellum grains, I had to optimize the process as much as possible since I had little time left. I came up with the idea of using a solver with an attribute transfer inside. I painted the lion red and the geometry of the dune black. In this way I would obtain the precise path where the lion walks. I used this color transfer to drive the deformation of the path and if I subtract the final deformed geometry from the original geometry I would get the precise volume where the lion's paws interact with the ground. I used this volume as the grains source.

A light in darkness

This project was developed during a month of classes. Once again we had to do a personal project while learning FLIP.

This was a demanding project. I quickly learned that in FLIP the computer's resources are exhausted quickly, so it is necessary to optimize whenever possible. I wanted to make a storm in the sea with waves crashing against a lighthouse. Due to the nature of the shots I wanted to do, I knew that it would not be easy to extend the simulation towards the horizon. But I also knew that in a stormy situation vision is reduced by fog and that this would work in my favor later.

When I had the simulation ready I started setting up the fog and doing render tests to see if the 100m x 100m simulation I did was enough to not see the cut on the horizon. It was not. I didn't want to make the fog thicker to cover up the cut as it would also lose detail in my main simulation. Time to think of a solution. I solved this problem by multiplying the mesh (first I reduced its resolution with a polyreduce) and using mirrors to extend the sea and go from having a 100m x 100m sea to a 400 x 400 one. I also had to clone the whitewater by 4 and used the camera frustrum to eliminate all the points that were outside the vision of the camera, going from 182 million particles to 96 million at the most critical moment.

A tribute to Tarkovsky

I did this project in a period of 3 weeks, in December last year.

This is a special one.

Pyro was the second Houdini subject we covered in class (the first one was particle simulation with POP) and it was the first time I started to feel like I was starting to do real visual effects. Tarkovsky has always been one of my favorite film directors and this time I wanted to pay tribute to him by recreating a scene from his film The Mirror without wanting to copy it entirely.

Shot of the film Mirror by Tarkovsky ( 1min 06):

The Pyro sim was made using axiom and reinforced with a POP sim. To complement the scene I looked for some very simple RBD and grooming tutorials.