Portal of Shadows: The Wizard's Destiny

Portal of Shadows: The Wizard's Destiny

In a realm where magic and the occult intertwine, a wizard named Arik faces a remarkable quest. Known for his extraordinary strength and ancient wisdom, Aric dedicated his life to maintaining the delicate balance between worlds. But now a dire threat looms on the horizon - a portal connecting his world to a dangerous realm of darkness and malice. As the portal grows menacingly, threatening to wreak havoc on both realms, Aric realizes that only he has the knowledge and skills needed to take it down. With firm determination and a reliable staff at hand, Arik embarks on a perilous journey, braves dangerous landscapes and faces powerful enemies, all in a race against time. Will the wizard's mastery of magic be enough to seal the portal's fate and save both realms from imminent doom? Only time will tell, as Aric's fate is tied to that of the unknown world.

How to start?!

In the search for inspiration, I generated some images via the AI-Midjourney and searched some references on the internet, and this is what I came up with:

The models

Now that I had a global idea of what I wanted to do, I searched for a portal that i could feed with a particle simulation as a gate to another world. I had this idea in mind of an ancient temple where modern humans found an old source of energy, which they used to power up a new technology to travel across unknown worlds.

But then I ran into a problem. I wanted to recreate the destruction of a big rocky construction like in my reference that emits smoke and dust, but the portal I found was a modern one made of metal. So what do I do? I kept looking for random 3D models on Sketchfab, and then I had the idea! Why not combine old and new technology? So I found a big skull that could work as a base, as an old evil technology that modern humans updated for their needs.

So I created a plausible combination of both.

I subtracted the overlapping parts, closed all unshared edges, kept the gate and the scull in separate groups, fractured them, and fed them into the DOP-Network.

For the Portal-Effect, I did a particle simulation that emits points that get attracted to a stretched sphere in the middle of the portal, and I came up with Sauron's Eye accidentally.

I found a super nice way to create very interesting shapes on point clouds using the "Attribblur note" with the "P-Attribute". That's how I created the tendrils inside the portal.

The lightnings

For the lightning arcs, I created some lines based on points with the same "id" attribute, which I then fed into a pointvop, adding a noise to the position based on the "curveu" attribute. In this way, I didn't distort the start and end positions of my created arc.

Having the base shape done, I created another attribute to drive a randon thickening in the following poliwire node. 

And finally, I added some distortion to the rendered arcs in Nuke, which really enhances their overall look.

The destruction

I hope you enjoyed your little adventure, and I thank you for your time! In case you liked my work, feel free to check out my FX REEL down below.

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