Motion Graphics Portfolio
A collection of motion graphics pieces created throughout my final year of studying - BA (Hons) Computer Generated Imagery at Solent University, Southampton, UK.
Motion Graphics and FX showreel
This reel showcases a range of FX and motion graphics projects created throughout my final year of university.
Parfum Bottle FX - Motion Graphics Sequence
The concept for the FX sequence was to create a product reveal motion graphics sequence for an aftershave bottle. To showcase a range of skills the sequence was designed to involve a variety of complex FX simulations and was set in a detailed photorealistic environment.
The goal of the project was to develop innovative approaches to intricate FX and to explore a range of visual styles. Complex motion graphics sequences were created featuring a diverse range of FX and a highly detailed, realistic CG environment. Additionally, throughout the production, tools were produced that can be used in future projects. The tools are versatile, solve complex problems that aren’t easily overcome and create unique customisable effects.
To streamline creative processes during the production phase, tools were created, and workflows developed for each element of the sequence in pre-production and were continuously developed in accordance with evolving scene requirements.
Rock Generator Tool
As the scene was set in a realistic cave environment it was crucial that a method for creating highly detailed and customisable rocks was established. A flexible rock generator HDA (Houdini Digital Asset) was developed early in the pre-production phase and was used to create all of the rock surfaces in the final sequence.
The rock generator has detailed settings for each stage of the workflow allowing the artists full control and flexibility to create specific rock looks.
Parameters included in the interface have been kept relevant and concise. The complexity of the underlying operations has been simplified and all parameters have been carefully labelled to make clear sense.
The falloff ramps present the artist an opportunity to customise the stepping levels and cut falloffs to an extreme level of precision. There are default curves included for mechanical damage (cuts), wind- like and water-like erosion (stepping) however, customising these ramps allows many types of erosion and cut details to be explored in an organic and natural interface.
Cave Visual Research
For the photorealistic cave environment, photography and video reference of Son Doong Cave in Vietnam was used extensively to inform the look of the cave.
Cave Creation Workflow
For the cave generation the reference photography was used as a starting point by extracting an AI generated depth map using an online implementation of Monocular Depth Estimation. This generated mesh was used as a guide and was manually edited to create a suitable input mesh for the rock generator which would roughly match the shape of the original image.
The base mesh was run through the faceting operations of the cave generator and then the geometry was split into segments for further processing. As the stepping and cut operations of the generator were run at a higher resolution it is important that segments were a viable size for timely processing. If sections were too large, then they may have exceeded the RAM available in the machines and failed to compute. Additionally this method allowed the use of LOD's (levels of detail) during staging. Rock surfaces were generated at 4 different LOD levels and were switched for each segment depending on the visibility within each camera shot, this reduced the required RAM budget significantly and increased render times.
By using a ‘UV auto seam’ node seams were generated based on the curvature of the geometry, each island created by the seams was expanded and given a unique group name. Some manual editing of islands was also necessary to fix some unsuitable sections of the automatically generated seams. It was important that there was significant overlap of the groups as the edges of the displacement would be incorrect due to missing point normals. To overcome this, overly expanded groups were used for displacement and then trimmed afterwards.
Rock Scattering
To achieve a realistic look of some rocks that have settled across the shoreline, a rigid body simulation was used to layer up rocks across the cave floor. Thousands of rocks were instanced and dropped into the scene, wind was used to push the rocks along the floor towards the shoreline, simulating the effects of a shore. Gravity was also scaled down below the intended water level to simulate the difference in resistance. These effects combined with many iterations of the simulations at varying rock sizes produced a natural looking collection of rocks across the cave floor.
To retrieve rocks of specific sizes into the simulation, for each loops were run over the initial starting points for the simulation. Within the loops a customised time shift node was created which randomises the input rock per point and within a specified range, allowing for precise control over the sizes of rocks within each layer of the simulation (Rocks were written to disk in size order during generation). In addition to this, a single point is also created and both this point and the imported rock are assigned a ‘rockid’ attribute, this attribute correlates to the rock chosen and is used for instancing and caching later.
To enable low resolution simulation, save disk space and to enable proper instancing in USD, the transforms for each rock were extracted and applied to the input point. This preserves the point number and ‘rockid’ from the input and applies the new transform from the result of the simulation to it. When geometry is instanced to these points the ‘rockid’ attribute stored on each point will be used to load the correct rock and due to the specific extraction process used the geometry will be in the exact position as the original simulation.
The main advantage to this workflow is the ability to simulate using low resolution geometry and then instance high resolution geometry onto the points, additionally only a single point is saved to disk for each rock and frame reducing the size on disk significantly.
Lake Surface
A small lake was simulated using the ocean spectrum tools. The process is relatively simple, a wind speed and direction was specified, and a looping time range was enabled. This resulted in a 120 frame animation of the lake which loops. The surface and interior volume were saved to separate alembic files and then looped and saved out again, although this used 5 times the disk space, when tests were conducted this method provided a more stable and performant solution than time shifting the geometry in the USD context.
Seabed
In addition to the rock simulations there was sea bed geometry generated from the settled rocks to create the appearance of settled sand. This mesh helps to fill in any gaps and increases performance by reducing the amount of small rocks necessary to fill the occupied volume. All rocks fully inside of the sand-fill mesh were removed from the rock cache.
Additionally, a simple grain simulation was performed, by spawning grains in between the rocks and letting them settle naturally, most of the intersections of rocks with the sand-fill base mesh were hidden. The fine layer of grains was created to add interest to the scene and to help to ground the particle FX in the environment as they would share a similar shader.
Dynamic Environmental Fog
The last component produced for the environment was some animated fog. The fog was created by taking a version of closed collision geometry for the cave and scattering points inside, these points were then simulated with wind using a large-scale grain simulation, this was chosen as grain simulations run using the highly performant vellum solver. The vellum solver is GPU accelerated and can calculate accurate collisions of high numbers of particles.
By filling the cave with large grains and applying wind in a zero-gravity simulation, it was possible to create the effect of disturbed wind in an enclosed space, the largely non-divergent properties of the grain simulation make it ideal for this purpose and produced realistic results whilst avoiding the need for a heavy pyro simulation. The points of the grains were rasterised in a volume and cached to disk as a VDB.
FX Forces and Collisions
Creating and optimising appropriate guide forces and collision geometry is crucial to creating high quality and art directable FX simulations. For simulations to be performant, collisions and forces must be optimised and kept minimal. Fast simulation times result in higher quality simulations as artists can iterate more freely and frequently allowing for greater creative control.
A range of methods were tested and used to generate appropriate collision geometry for various simulations. It was important that geometry created for collisions was as lightweight as possible whilst retaining the detail required for each simulation, as some simulations required only part of the cave or specific elements to be considered. Reducing input collision geometry down to only the required parts results in much faster simulation times.
An advection volume was generated from simple input curves and modulated with a VOP network to create vectors in varying directions. This was achieved through calculating the cross product of the point normals of the input curves and blending this with the input normals.
Grain Simulations
The grain simulations were developed throughout the pre-production phase, techniques for shading the grains relative to their velocity were explored and ultimately incorporated into the final shader to control the ‘metalness’ level and involved in opacity calculations in the final material transitions. In the initial tests emission was driven by the velocity however this effect was changed to a more subtle effect in the early stages of production.
The grains’ attractiveness and mass was iteratively adjusted throughout the simulation setup process to achieve grains which loosely stick together and break apart again, this can be seen in the final FX simulations and in the pre-production emissive grain simulations.
To achieve specific art directable simulations, the workflow involves an initial simulation with a small number of particles (highlighted in yellow below), forces can then be tweaked until the main motion is correct and trails form the intended shapes. The advantage to achieving the correct motion with a lightweight simulation is that simulations times are much shorter, this results in an artist friendly workflow which can be iterated quickly.
For the final part of the sequence the grains were required to form the shape of a bottle. To achieve this the most straightforward and clean method was to perform a simulation of the grains starting in the shape of the bottle and breaking apart, then reversing the cached simulation. This method required animating the bottle and grains in reverse and forces were created to simulate the required look when played in reverse.
The glue constraints of the grains were carefully set in relation to the curve, axis and wind force amplitudes, which were carefully animated to pull the particles apart. This was important to achieve a balance between the bottle holding together and tearing away in chunks which would eventually break into sparse grains.
Liquid
For the grains to transition into the glass a liquid mesh was created, this mesh was also used to delete any particles completely intersected reducing the final particle count in the simulation and contributing overall look of the dissolving effect.
Pyro
For coherency, the pyro FX in the sequence are driven by the same forces as the grain simulations and use the grain points as sourcing points. Pyro sourcing inherits velocity from the grains however with inverted velocity, this means that as grains move smoke is produced with an initial velocity in the opposite direction of movement. This creates the effect of the grains propelling forwards with a smoke trail being exerted behind, producing extremely dynamic results as the smoke sourcing is directly impacted by the velocity of the grains. When grains suddenly accelerate due to forces, motion is reflected in the smoke as it is exerted at a higher velocity. This effect enhances the composition and ties together large-scale complex grain movements which makes the animation more readable.
Many iterations of smoke simulations were performed, sourcing parameters and forces were tweaked at a low resolution. (In pyro simulations this is controlled by the particle separation scale) until the desired movements were close to the intended look. Once the simulation was behaving correctly the resolution was increased and cached. This workflow increases iteration speed and reduces the size on disk as the files created from pyro simulations are large.
Comparison cards were created during the look-dev process to assist in choosing appropriate values for the volume material settings.
Look Development
Throughout the production look development was carried out for each element. The materials for the scene were complex as each had specific requirements. The grain materials transitioned between a dark metallic surface and transmissive green glass material, this was controlled by velocity and the sensitivity driven by time. The closer the grains were to being wholly formed into the bottle, the more sensitive they were to being changed to glass by velocity.
The rock surface material used layers of noise, blending rocky tones together with similar patterns to the rock generator. These noise layers contributed to specular and roughness maps. A global modifier was created to influence any geometry below the waterline to darken and reduce the specular component to near zero, additionally an inverse effect was applied with above the waterline. This increased specular levels and decreased roughness simulating a wet look on surfaces slightly above the water. The darkening was adjusted to creep over the waterline and a coat with a rough specular value was applied to the same areas. The unlit material can be seen below:
Post Production
Adding camera effects to raw CG renders can help to improve the photo-realism, chromatic aberration was added by transforming the red channel of the image slightly to the left. A slight quadratic blur was applied to the entire image to simulate lens blur and softening, this also helps with noise. Then a colour grade and camera grain was applied to the image, the entire chain of lens effects produced images with a range of photographic qualities and was used for each shot in the sequence with a slightly altered colour grade to match between shots.
Below:
Left image : No lens effects
Right Image: With lens effects
Rocky Rumble
This was a short exercise to explore the rock tool created in the Parfum FX project and to experiment with a monochromatic visual style. The juxtaposition of rocks colliding with a solid rippling mirror was also an interesting concept to explore.
Infected Expansion
This project results from the culmination of explorations throughout the development of a custom infection solver. The infection level from the custom solver influences displacement of a sphere, which is then run through a particle network which scatters points to infected areas with density driven by infection value, the age of the particles and level of infection influences the size of the spheres and material transitions.
Solver Demonstration
This is the effect of the custom infection solver when applied to a sphere from 1 initial infection point. The output points from the infection driven particle network is also shown in the second clip.
CGFX Festival Ident
This ident was created as a personal project during studying to be shown at the industry speaker event 'CFGX 2022' at Solent University, UK. I wanted to create something dynamic, sleek and compelling which would catch viewers attention and intrigue them. The particle system which was created was quite simple but effective, particles were emitted into a wind field and when they collided with the 3D text geometry they became visible and stationary, secondary wind forces then pull the particles apart in controlled yet dynamic movements. An atmospheric environment was chosen with thick fog, the particles are illuminated from below with a very fine field of light piercing the fog, as particles move out of this light source they fade away and ultimately dissolve.
Dodecahedron Crystal Growth
In this exploration a fractal system was created which grows dodecahedrons from the faces of previous iterations. The first generation of this system is coloured green, this animation is then instanced onto faces of itself and coloured orange. All subsequent generations keep the orange colour.
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