Resurrection

Queen Pearl

I dedicate this project to my Mom "Rani" (Queen) and my Dad "Muthupandian" (Pearl) for supporting me in my decisions and actions to change career from a Software Engineer. I wanted to create this project to resurrect my Grandma who passed away on the day I boarded flight to US, to pursue VFX at Gnomon School of Visual Effects.

"Queen Pearl" - arrives to Throne Mountains from Nebula. The Beam acts a bridge for her to travel between worlds. Sky opens up a Portal for the beam to enter Earth from Nebula reaching the throne where Queen Pearl ends her interstellar journey to become mortal again.

My Goal for this project was to explore different systems inside Houdini & procedural tools to create variety of effects. While I was using the robust tools for the simulations, I also created several HDAs - Lightning, Bridge, Rock Generators, Low vs High Res switch, to make the repeatable and tedious process more fun. I achieved art directable tools by streamlining the process right from the beginning with scalability in mind. I used VEX to overcome certain hiccups, finally packaging the systems into HDAs to power the project.

Reference

Below are the references I gathered to drive the project. I wanted to have a overall "Blue" tone, so started with the nebula shot, to throne mountains which has "Brown" rocky shades with "Orange" firepits in the bridge. Then to last shot where Queen Pearl has a "White" Aura around her and "Grey" Smoke from the portal. The warm and cold colors supplemented the composition

Environment

I started off with two points, creating a line between them, sweeping to create the bridge base. And using fracturing tools to create the ground surface of the bridge, then modifying the point attributes to randomize the position and rotation of the stones. Resampling the same line to get desired number of firepits, and also using the location of those resampled points to copy our fire simulations later to keep the whole system procedural. The stairs from bridge to the throne undergoes the same process.

Packaging this system into stone bridge generator that will take in a curve as input will produce ancient style bridges with firepits that is completely art directable with control over number of firepits, curved/elevated bridge, stone density and so on.

Using VDB, I was able to procedurally create complex rocks. With the rock generator in place, it was just the wedging process to create multiple versions of it and then copying to desired position. Heightfields to create mountains. Once the rocks are in place and the environment is completely manifested, I rendered out a proxy version to minimize the load time during rendering.

Beam

Points Scattered onto displaced geometry created out of a curve and little bit of VEX to make the points stick and travel along the geometry. Point velocities are calculated and modified using noises. Points and velocities are rasterized to volume and fed to pyro solver.

Fire

Attribute that will act as the emission mask for logs, noised it up and animated the mask to vary the fire emission overtime. Once the fire simulation in its desired state, wedged the emission mask and the micro solvers to get different variations. 

Lightning

Lightning HDA that will control the growth, branches, noises, width, output as geo or strands. I really love the recursive processing feature found in RBD material fracture node, so I used multiparm in this HDA which will add recursive noises to the lightning strands, each layer of the noise can be used to art direct the lightning shape. Primary big shapes, secondary mid shapes and tertiary high frequency details. Each layer can be animated to reflect the growing energy of a lightning. A growth attribute that will drive the different AOVs - fade out, burst, tips, etc. for the lightning which can be used in compositing to get the desired effect.

Portal

pyro driving the majority of effects in this shot. several smoke simulation layers are placed on top of each other producing complex effect on the portal opening, complimenting the particle simulation. The particle simulation is driven by smoke simulation advection.

Finally another smoke simulation and a flying debris particle simulation to emphasize the force of the beam and to add that atmospherics to blend all the effects together.

Port Explosion

In this project I wanted to incorporate the techniques learnt from the Matte painting class. Sky Replacement, Perspective, Day2Night, Lighting Manipulation, Neon Lighting, Projections inside Nuke were used to create the BG. The foreground involves the explosion and containers created in 3D. Explored pyro inside Houdini, created custom velocity fields to drive the explosion and shockwave. Temperature field of explosion was used to drive scattering of shockwave. Rendered in Redshift and finally composited in Nuke

I created a 3 point perspective grid and proxy buildings based on that grid. Then went on with the matte painting of the buildings. Separated the building layers into left, middle, and right chunks for the projections. Neon elements were exported separately to control the emissive strength/flickering.

Camera exported from Houdini and used in 3d scene inside Nuke. Rendering out the containers and the explosion separately with several AOVs guided in compositing.

Demo reel

please find my demo reel below that contains other projects

Thank you!

I`m glad that I made the decision to pursue VFX at Gnomon, very grateful for all the Instructors, Staffs, and Peers for imparting the knowledge in me. I take this wonderful journey of transforming from Software developer to VFX artist into the industry - to learn, collaborate and contribute to both Artistical and Technical worlds. 

Thank you Readers, Fellow Artist and Jury for viewing my entry. I wish the best for all the Rookie Awards 2023 participators.


Please feel free to reach to my LinkedIn 
I humbly welcome any feedback or suggestion. if you have any question, please reach out, I would love to talk if I could be of any help.


Finally, Check out my Generalist page that showcases my journey at Gnomon. Thank you!