LYFE

PITCH

If life exists outside planet Earth, it may not have some of the universal characteristics found on Earth, such as the presence of nucleic acids. The terrestrial life we know would thus become a sub-category of a more universal life, the lyfe.

Here is my graduation project from VFX-Workshop.

This project was quite challenging for me, both in terms of art direction and FX.

The project took 6 to 10 months from pre-production to compositing.

Congrats also to Adrien Dautel and Mathis Coopman for their amazing sound design and music !

The Fxs were made in Houdini and rendered with redshift. Most of the project was done in blender and rendered with Cycle.

KEYSHOTS

REFERENCES

I was very inspired by the style of Arrival and Dune (for the spaceship). Also, I took some inspiration from the amazing Ash Thorp and of course Gravity for the re-entry shots.

BREAKDOWN

Crystal shell

For the Crystal shell I was inspired by the incredible work of Simon Holmedal called "Us By Night"

In order to understand how to do the effect, I watched the talk by Simon explaining his process, and also an amazing tutorial from Omar Meradi !

Here is the Crystal shell inside Houdini with some parameters to control animation, shape and speed. 

And some turns.

Foetus

For the foetus, I took the base model from metahuman and posed it, later in the project I realized I needed the foetus to be animated. So instead of reposing it and animate it, I just figured out how to procedurally rig/animate it in pose !

To rig it procedurally, I used this setup :

And then to animate it procedurally using kinefx I used some rigwrangle with some vex I found on cgwiki !

For the membrane, I used vellum.

Atmospheric re-entry

For the Re-entry shots here are some references I used, from gravity and another Houdini related short film

I tried to use pdg/tops to wedge and automate the fx in order to have multiple different objects as colliders, so that I can have some variations in the shapes later.

However, it was very CPU intensive, and I didn't have a powerful computer at the time, so I ended up using the same cache on all the sphere but offset in time and rotation to break the repetition.

Thanks again to all my teachers and classmates who helped me along the way.

I hope you liked it !