Calculated Cataclysm | FX Showcase

World Destroyer - Houdini and Redshift | Breakdown

This FX piece was essentially a tribute to my childhood. I referenced some of my favorite comic books and movies that I used to read/watch as a child. My love for FX and CG was sparked by movies like the early Superman, played by Brandon Routh, the not-so-popular 2004 Daredevil, played by Ben Affleck, and the visuals from Ghost Rider. 

The scene was worked over five months, going through countless iterations, mainly over the fracturing and texturing of the RBD simulations happening on the ground as well as a fair bit of look dev to achieve the dystopian / end of the world look I had imagined at the start of the project.

World Destroyer was rendered entirely in Houdini and Maxon Redshift and composited in Nuke. Responsible for all aspects except building models (sketchfab / kitbash)

Process

I started by referencing The Man of Steel, taking inspiration from the countless heat vision scenes and scenes of dystopia/destruction from The Last of Us to lay out and imagine the city where this destruction would occur. 

I rendered 13 AOVs inside Redshift to have complete control over the lighting and look without having to go into Houdini and render all the frames again.  I then spent a week compositing the AOVs to reconstruct my beauty render, dialing in the depth of field, bokeh, lens blurs, and lens flares, and polished it up for the final render.

Technical Breakdown

Fracture and Constraint Setup

Ground Fracture Setup and VEX

Fracture Process

Edge Glow Procedural Material Setup 

Stealth | Breakdown

Stealth was a big project; by the end of it, I utilized many different solvers, some like the ripple solver that I had hardly ever touched. The idea behind this project was to combine liquid and fire FX to create a single project. Nothing better than an assassin in the ocean stalking her prey while the enemy rains down a barrage of fire arrows. 

Process

Most of the reference I collected for this piece was to look dev how the fire arrow would look and behave (i.e., how turbulent it would be, the length of the flame, and how it behaves in the wind). A lot can be referenced from Nordic movies/tv shows that depict the Vikings as it was one of the most used defense tactics of the time. Reference for the lighting and mood was more or less a stormy day in the ocean with turbulent winds and rain.

Before starting Stealth, I did some low-res sims testing different materials, viscosity, and whitewater.

Procedural Fire Arrow Setup 

I set up the primary path/trajectory of the arrow using a Pyro Trail node, and then I deleted all the paths except one. On a basic level, all paths from which the arrows travel are based on instances of that original pyro trail node with different length and velocity parameters. Each arrow also has a VDB encompassing its length to get collisions when the arrows come in contact with the FLIP tank, in turn causing splashes as they enter the water.

Eternal Fire | Breakdown

The inspiration for this piece was from one of my favorite childhood movies, Lord of the Rings. I remember reading J.R.R. Tolkien's books and imagining and coming up with the landscapes, places, and characters I read about. In a way, those books and movies got me interested and excited about Animation and VFX, and thats when I knew this was something I wanted to pursue as a career.

Process

I started by referencing actual active volcanoes,  like Mount Etna, Stromboli, and Vesuvius, to name a few. Then I moved on to what an active volcano's smoke plume looks like. While all realistic smoke plumes look impressive, they still lack the cinematic look of burning fire and ash and a sense of explosion/eruption one mostly sees in LOTR concept art. Hence, besides referencing some unique 2D concept artwork, I decided to do a quick matte painting before starting my project to help me visualize the end goal more. The volumes were rendered in Mantra, and everything else was rendered in Redshift.

I did a quick matte painting at the project's start to visualize the mountains and framing. The initial idea was to have aliens invade the scene, but I chose not to go ahead for obvious reasons.

Comp Work

Like any other project, I rendered out the AOVs I needed to reconstruct my beauty pass. In Nuke, I could dial in the color grading and look of my scene on an individual element basis. I like having control over my lighting and colors, and I've found compositing to be one of the determining factors in what makes or breaks a piece.

Houdini Setup for Terrain and Lava

The terrain was generated using heightfields in Houdini. As with any heightfield workflow, I layered heightfield noises, flowfield, remaps and distorts until I was finally happy with how everything looked. I used a heightfield erode right at the end to generate all of my masks that I could then use to texture the terrain inside of Redshift.

Lava was generated using different types of masks, primarily ambient occlusion masks. I processed the lava mesh through a point VOP that would factor in noises like Worley and Flow and then, based on the alpha luminance, would displace along the normals. This way, I could quickly look dev the swirls and patterns I wanted to appear on the lava mesh. I calculated another ambient occlusion map from this newly generated lava mesh and assigned low-intensity shaders to occluded areas and a high emissive texture to the nonoccluded areas.

Smoke Plume Process

The smoke plume was simulated using the Sparse Pyro Solver. At its height, the smoke plume is 77 million voxels. Since I was working on an accurate scale, rendering a single smoke plume at the volcano's size was almost impossible. Hence I rendered the plume at a much smaller scale and then instanced seven different versions of the smoke plume (different velocities)  to create the final shot. 

Since the scene was getting extremely heavy, I turned everything in my scene into a Redshift Proxy, so Redshift could load geometries and volumes without having to recalculate data into the RAM each frame. This way, I could avoid the constant "not enough RAM" crashes and speed up my workflow immensely. 

Cloud Giants

A project based on clouds showcasing custom velocities, pyro interactions, and some lighting rendering and camera work skills. Rendered in Redshift, animations from Mixamo.

Process

The project was based on interaction with clouds. I started by creating a cloudscape from simulated volumes. There were around 4-5 different clouds, and everything else was rotated and scaled instances. 

Initial cloudscape to get familiar with simulating clouds. Each cloud was simulated for a certain amount of frames, after which I extracted a single frame that looked most appropriate for the scene. 

Cloud Simulation Process

The clouds were simulated using the pyro solver. Turbulence and velocity were fed into the solver, in addition to some basic VEX code to calculate the temperature of the volume and how high it should rise. 

Velocity, based on deformation, was calculated from the character and fed into the solver to displace the cloud.

Witch Magic

I came up with this concept while ideating on wanting to visualize dark energy in conjunction with green witch magic. I used a bit of xyz dist vex to get the balls to track on the character's hand, and some flip and POP advected from pyro emanating on the hands.

This was a fun render regarding composition, camera movement, color, and aesthetics. It was rendered entirely in Redshift and Houdini. Responsible for all aspects except the Mixamo rig and animation.

Process

This project went through a couple of iterations; Throughout this project, I played around and tested different color schemes, framing, and angles. 

One of the earlier versions of this piece was almost a completely different direction than what I ended up with in my final output.

Procedural Energy Setup

I had to blast and isolate the arm from the main body to create the balls emanating from the arm. After using a neat xyzdist and lerp function, I could animate the sphere to move from one end of the arm to the other.

Thank you!

Here is the link to my LinkedIn, Artstation, and Instagram.