downFall

by Gemonix on 1 Jun 2023 for Rookie Awards 2023

All these years I've been learning a lot of tips and techniques from amazing people. I hope I can be like them someday, here I'm showing some of my skills I've acquired thanks to them. I really wish to work for big movies.

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downFall

by Gemonix

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This is the first part -of two- from a project I mostly made at Think Tank Training Centre as part of my mentorship some months ago. It was inspired somehow in Pirates of the Caribbean, just by the looks, but I also wanted add darker mood and a little bit of story. So, basically, in this first part we're just meeting our ship and something will start happening with our protagonist after a strange dark kinda spectre passes by.

BREAKDOWN

I made almost everything in this project except for the ship model. Everything else, from shaders, animations, lightning, cams, fx, etc. was made by me, supervised by my mentor at that time. Textures, composition and everything else also by myself. This project intends to show what I could achieve in Houdini.

I'll show first playblast image and then final result, and I'll also explain some of the fx and procedural extras made.

Materials

The materials for the all the ship and other props like broken wood planks and lamps were made in Substance Painter. For the rocks I decided to made a procedural material inside Houdini, as the models (both broken wood and rocks) were also created inside the program. The rocks were made scattering some random points and adding some exaggerated geometry to them, creating volumes and adding texture. This way we can generate different types of rocks that will depend on the shape of the basic geometry and the scattered points. The shader is principally some coloured noises and detects de edges from the geometry to add white, so it depends in the resolution of the rocks.

Simulations

Oceans are something interesting to work with, specially this ones where the velocity was way slower than I imagined. I tried many ways to recreate my "ripple" effect and I ended using ripple from ship, some particles and masking areas to match somehow my references.

Rain was made as random points falling from the "sky" that is actually just a plane from a invisible cube that just takes what's inside the camera's field of view, just for optimization. Not a storm, just some rain for the feel.

Veils are just a simple vellum effect affected by wind and ship velocity. Fog, just volumes with noise and wind colliding with the objects.

And finally, the windows. Just a changing texture wasn't enough, a little bit more like the ice growing to be faithful to my references. Masking my window with noises and random points growing with the masks, then from that points, our frost starts growing.