Visual Effects Reel - Kavi Dey

Pagoda Destruction

The original model was concepted in Blender. Below are various renders from Blender. While the model looks nice and has decent textures, it is almost completely non-manifold and has terrible topology, making it very hard to use in an RBD sim. Additionally, it was not created in a procedural manner, so it was difficult and time consuming to make modifications to the design.

This is a board of concept images of the Shitennō-ji Buddhist temple in Ōsaka, Japan that the model is based on.

This is the final composite (done in Photoshop) using the model created in Blender.

After realizing that I would not be able to fracture or simulate the model I had created in Blender, I set out recreating a procedural, manifold, and parameterized version of the model in Houdini. 

I ran into some trouble while trying to fracture smaller pieces of wood (especially the beams on the roof). Boolean operations often resulted in mesh artifacts that were ugly not usable.

I was able to fix this by doing a few things. First, I took really problematic meshes and triangulated them, which seemed to reduce the boolean artifacts. I also switched from using just RBD Material Fracture for the fracturing to also using custom boolean objects which allowed me to manually fix the specific pieces that had artifacts.

Finally, I did a few rounds of simulation using  meatball forces for destruction, and ended up with this:

Ice Blast

This was the first full project that I completed with Houdini for simulation and VFX. The match move was done in Syntheyes, compositing in After Effects, and texture extraction with Blender and Photoshop.