FX Artist|3D Generalist Show Reel

VFX INTEGRATION - HOUDINI EXPLOSION

This was my first project made inside of Houdini during my Escape Studios journey.
My goal with this project was to simulate a chemical explosion based on a given reference.
This shot allowed me to experiment with Houdini's Pyro solver and understand its parameters, play with microsolvers and get a better comprehension of basic velocity fields.
With this scene I also had the chance to work on a basic POP grains sim to recreate the ground impact effect.
Tracking was done inside of 3DE4, which I studied at Event Horizon School, and Nuke was used for the compositing of the AOVs

STATION 14 - FX BREAKDOWN

This is one of my favourite projects i've been worked on, since I was given the opportunity to focus purely on the FX part of it.
The scene was made by Elia Merlin inside of Maya, once a basic setup of it was ready we recreated it inside of Houdini so that I could start wedging the various simulations while he was adding details, shading, and lighting it.
This sped up the whole workflow, and allowed us to deliver the needed passes for compositing simultaneously.

I mainly had to work with POPs and volumes to deliver the desired rain and fog effects, I comped 3 rain sims with different depths in the scene to sell the feeling of a rainy night without making the scene too heavy, and used the particles splashing on impact (coming from a POP replicate) as volume emitters when needed (i.e. on top of the spaceships).
This hybrid POPs to volume workflow was also ideal when creating mist coming from the wagon's wheels, as it allowed me and Elia to have control on the emitted droplets and volumes separately once it got to the compositing stage.

Rain Passes

Wagon Mist Passes

To create the puddle splash I used Houdini's FLIP solver in conjunction with a ripple displace solver.
Once the FLIP sim was turned into mesh I used a Volume Sample function inside of a point wrangle to capture the ripple displacement caused by the rain and foot impact and merge it together with the puddle mesh.
This was probably the most challenging side of the project, as I didn't have previous experience with neither of these solvers, and I've learned a lot in the process of making it.
I'm sincerely happy I worked with Elia on this project, as it showed us what it means to work in a team and designing a functional pipeline.

I believe we've both learned a lot from this project, although this is just a miniscule fraction of what it feels to be inside of a production environment, I'm very proud of all the troubleshooting we did together to find the fastest and best way to integrate the FX I did with his beautiful scene.
I highly encourage you to check out Elia's Rookies entry for a breakdown of the scene creation inside of Maya.

UE 5 ENVIRONMENT - UNDEGROUND CORRIDOR

With this project I gave real-time rendering a try using Unreal Engine 5.0 .

I had to create my own materials inside of UE's node editor, figure out the basics of blueprints, and I even added some simple Niagara particle sims to spawn droplets and sparks.

Modelling was done inside of Maya and Zbrush, while for the texturing phase I used Adobe's Substance Painter, Substance Designer and Photoshop.

Since Lumen had just came out at the time I worked on this shot I had quite some troubleshooting to do to fix some issues in the scene, especially regarding light's reflection in closed spaces.

I also experimented a lot with post process volumes and CineCam Actors

LAMBORGHINI HURACAN

I modelled this car when I first started learning Maya, as a way to better understand shapes and basic topology flow.
This project also thaught me some tricks regarding heavy geometry baking on lower-resolution ones.
Once again, textures were made inside of Adobe's Substance Painter and Photoshop, then brought into Maya and fed into a CarPaint Material.

Model's Back and Front View

Reference Gathering

I hope you enjoyed, Thanks for watching!