Lucas Mountford FX Reel 2024

2024 FX Showreel

Hi my name is Lucas and I am a rookie FX artist currently in my second year of study. After being introduced to Houdini earlier this year, I have made it my mission to become an FX artist and work on the cinematic masterpieces that have continually inspired me throughout my education.

In this entry I present my FX showreel: A collection of my best work over this past year. I hope it showcases my passion for VFX and desire to continue learning. I hope you enjoy my projects as much as I enjoyed making them.

01 - Integrated Ghost Shot

This is one of the shots I made for a university project. The module was an introduction to digital visual effects for modern entertainment. I was introduced to Houdini and gained valuable experience in other areas such as camera tracking (3DEqualizer) and compositing (Nuke).

The purpose of this shot was to create a convincing VFX 'illusion' making use of particles, simulation, lighting/rendering, and compositing. All work is my own except for character mesh and animation.

Development Process

In order to create the effect I wanted, I needed to use an inside group of dense particles and an outside group of smoke particles that spawned from the first group. I did this by using a volume as well as a pyro simulation. To create a change in colour as the particles moved away from the mass, I sample the density to control the colour of the smoke.

Here is my node graph. First I scatter points that deform with the geometry. Then I generate a particle simulation with wispy particles that die off quickly. Next, I use these particles to simulate a smoke effect around the surface of the ghost. For the surface I turn the original points into a volume to give this double depth effect.

I created geometry to represent the environment. I used this to get shadow and reflection passes that greatly improve the believability of the shot. Since I am compositing on real footage I made sure to use a 360 camera to capture the lighting conditions in a HDRI. This gives the CG matching lighting to the scene and allows for correct shadows & reflections at render time.

A major challenge with this project was needing to 'phase' the effect through the door. After looking into potential solutions I decided to use deep compositing to crop the volume in Nuke. Since deepEXR's store depth information, I could manually set the distance at which the effect became visible.

Compositing involved experimenting with different blending operations to improve the aesthetic of the shot. I also applied motion blur and grain to blend the CG with the footage. Finally, I applied additional treatment to the footage which involved a final colour correct and a VHS effect. This effect uses expressions featuring changing noise patterns in layers to create VHS scanlines, spontaneous glitching, and random grunge effects.

Final Result

02 - Sand Disintegration Effect

Another effect I made for this module was this integrated sand simulation using Vellum. This effect uses many of the same techniques as the previous one e.g. tracking, HDRI lighting, multi-layer compositing. Thus, I will just go over the development of the effect and the resulting composite.

Development Process

Firstly I tracked the footage and imported it into houdini. Then I used the 3D points to create guide geometry for each of the steps and the ground. This was quite challenging and it took multiple iterations to line up each of the steps with the footage correctly.

There was an issue with my earlier renders where the grain would tear at the hip. This was because I used the first frame as the rest pose where the character’s leg was compressed. I fixed this by using a timeshift to give the vellum SOP a more realistic pose. I use the two attributes “stopped”, “pintoanimation” to animate when the grains are affected by forces, instead of sticking to the animation.

The animation is done through this VOP that gives each point a 0-1 value based on the relative Y position. The outcome allows me to animate the grains being affected from bottom to top using keyframes.

Houdini Breakdown

After setting up the grains, I simulate them in dynamics. I then delete the points out of view to optimise the final geometry.

The believability of this shot comes from well lined up geometry as well as the shadow/reflections visible in the comp. Working on these integration projects has taught me the importance of simulating these real world interactions as otherwise viewers react negatively saying 'it looks CG'.

03 - Symbiote Effect

The most recent effect I have made, using all my combined understanding of Houdini. This was challenging because there are limited tutorials for this effect. Despite this, I am very proud of what I was able to accomplish.

This project consists of 4 different effects.

1. The climbing goo

2. The climbing tendrils

3. The symbiote crawler

4. The spreading goo around the bag

3.1 Climbing Goo

The climbing goo makes use of vellum fluids. I use an attract force to get it to climb up the pedestal. The look is achieved by converting to a VDB in order to smooth the spheres. I then convert it back to surface polygons and smooth the output. This gives it a stringy tendril-like effect.

3.2 Climbing Tendrils

For this effect I use find shortest paths and a similar vdb method to improve the look of the effect.

A common method for growing vines/tendrils is using the carve SOP to push points along the curve (left picture). For my effect this didn't work as it uses the start and end points of each curve, rather than the actual distance. To overcome this, I straighten the curves and keyframe a clip SOP (right picture).

Here is the node graph for this technique. I use a rest node to return the clipped curves to their previous positions.

3.3 Symbiote Crawler

This effect makes use of the 'nearpoints()' VEX function to create tendrils to scatter points. I use point normals defined by the initial geometry to dictate the direction that the tendrils reach.

3.4 Bag Goo

For the goo spread effect, I make use of pyro tools to simulate a source burn. I then turn turn these points into a VDB and create a surface from this.

Symbiote Composite

I created this short video as an example of how working procedurally allows you to reuse created effects with completely different shot contexts.

Thank you for checking out my submission for the rookie awards 2024. I am glad I could present my hard work over this year. I will have much more to show next year as well. I hope you liked it!