Void's border

Final result

There we are, the journey comes to end.
Unfortunatly, I didn't success to do the entirety of the sequence, neither every FX that I wanted, but I certainly learned and I am a bit proud of the result despite all problems that I am aware.

I want to thank Rebelway and The Rookies to give us 3d animated material to learn and practice FX and for the organisation of this contest.

Rendering & Compositing

Finaly, everything was rendered with Redshift in many different passes. Each passes was setup with his AOV, The basic setup was : 
        -Diffuse per light
        -GI
        -Specular per light
        -Reflection per light
        -Refraction (very few refraction -> don't need to over size the exr)
        -Emission
        -Volume per light
        -transFilter (for monster's fake SSS)
        -transGI  (for monster's fake SSS)
        -transRAW  (for monster's fake SSS)
        -Crypthomatte
        -Depth

Of cours activated or not depending of the render's passe

At first I wanted to work with mantra or renderman because they handel in a better way deep and depth.

I know deep was updated in redshift but as i said on my Environement update : I am on an old version...

Despit of that probleme, I chose redshift for his render's speed. So I get over deep and I used old schoole matte objects at render time.

For DOF I decide to do it at composition to reduce render time and unfortunatly the quality of it, because of Zdefocus and depth probleme. Indeed, my redshift version dosn't handel depth correctly on particules and volume rendering. Therefore I manage some shity depth edge extention from the other passes ( cyborg, monster, etc...) to get an non accurate depth but to, at least have information for the Zdefocus...

For the sky, I projected my stills rendered frames on geo and imported the alambic camera in nuke.
About 6 frames was used to cover the whole scene.

The rest of the compositing work is a bit of denoising, firefly removal, glow, color correction, sharpen, etc...
And finaly, lens FX was added : vignetting, chromatic aberation & soften on border, lens distortion, camera noise, a bit of dust and a bit of bloom

I find a cool trick to clean fireflys : blur the image and merge in min mode. It certenly reduce the sharpness but firefly are dimmed drasticly. And merged with the rest of the comp, i prefer a bit less of sharpen than fireflys.

Lens FX comparison

FX works - part 3

Backdash

    I have done this FX near the start of the contest, after doing the deckloak FX because it was the same process.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to do the "claw slash ground destruction", and adjust the backdash to do a slow motion or any thing like that, and moreover no time to render and comp it. So I just want to share it with you, but it will not be in the final result.

It is composed of the same component of the deckloak FX : disintegration particles, insideSkin, skin and smoke. Here I added a volume dust from the body hit to the ground. And a kind of portal / flash where  the end of the teleportation append.

FX works - part 2

Chaine

It is the first time I simulate a chain, at first i thought it was easy, and it was, until i need to animate the movement.

Two workflow were possible, crop simulation and instancing or RBD. I directly chose the RBD way because the chain is clearly visible in the frame and near to the foreground, so physical currency was mandatory.

I used vdbToSphere proxys as showed in this video https://vimeo.com/305543446 to getan efficient and proper collision. This works fine in a slow moving simulation, but with fast moving collision and plenty of movement, we instantly have to increase the simulation's substep.
So I tried to use soft constraint, but it introduces an other problem : the sim try to go back to the start position.
To fix this, the constraint position has to be updated over time and thanks to the Destruction FX cours, I am now able to do it with a sop solver inside the dop network.
This constraint setup helped a lot to keep the chain attached in between his rings but a high substep is still needed for proper monster's collision.
The goal was to catch the monster's claw, this create some probleme... How to get the movement and how to keep the chain attached at his start.
I thinked : go use active and annimated / deforming attribut ! But nop, after some tests it dosn't work correctly because the velocity is not correctly passe througth the sim and the "bolas" effect is not working.
The second probleme is that the active geometry separate himself from the unactive parts.
And finaly, the chain "unwarp" and beeing elongated because the little gap between unactive animated pieces  is tightens, resulting in a flappy chain....

Given that, for the "Bolas" FX, I create a custom velocity to rotate the chain around the claw and transfert in the sim via a point cloud lookup in a POP vop.  Easy enougth...
For the animation, no more active and unactive attribute, everything active and the movement is dirven by a velocity transfert from an hand animated chain at sop level ( name attribut is use to match the pieces to transfert ). Easy enought.... The trickiest part is to attache the chain : I compute the direction from each pieces to the first one, this give me a velocity to  pull the chain. This velocity is mixed thanks to the curveu attribut with all other forces and velocity in the sim, find the good balance was not that easy.

Each chain was simulated separately and freeze at frame 333, merge, fractured and re simulated from this frame to create the broken part of the chain FX.
I certainly don't have the best workflow, but to be honest, I am a bit proud of the result. There are still problems, but there it is, it will be better the next time.

Then I added secondary FX :

    The portal, where the chain comes from, made of 3 layers ( it is a background FX so 3 layer gives enough detail here). Two layers are made of particles with different behaviors and the third one are just an animated circle.

    The cyborg's summoning spells in 3 phases: energy concentration, transfer, suction. The portal opening is timed on the first phase.
Every phase is composed of 2 step simulation. The first aim to create a curves witch drive the second particles simulation. The first phase is done on a rest position and then point deformed with the animated cyborg.

    Finally, for the summoning, 2 volume. One representing a kind of flammy-magic circle advected with custom velocity field, and the second for the rupture of the chain: the monster break the spell.

In order to see a bit better through the flammes, I Instanced a vdb sphere on camera's position and I substract it from the flammes. I find out that the easyes way to get the camera's potition from an alambic file was to create a vdb from camera, it create thc primitive's point at the camera's location.

     For the chain's secondarys FX, I added desintegration FX to the brocken chain. for that I used a propagation solver and used as a pyro and particules source.

    Originaly, the growing of the chain should have some particuls and smoke, as in my reference ( WoW Shadowland cinematic. But  because of switch between annimated and simmulated geomatry, I had interpolation probleme  giving me straight unwanted lines.
Unfortunatly Ididn't had time to fix it..

Given that, i decide to juste use emissive material in shading to mimic the grow

Extra destruction - Claw Hit

For extra ground destruction, I decide tu use sop deformation insted of RBD's simulation.
The fractured (and packed) geometry are drived by the original ground animated with softtransform and blend nodes.

Then, dust particles are emitted based of pieces movement ( current position - previous position ).
While I have 2 layers of fractured geometry, particles collision are a bit weird. To fix this, ray allows me to correct the particles's position : projection in the +Y direction and to the farthest surface.

FX works - part 1

Maybe by over self-confidence or wonder of shine, I took every oportunity in the shoot to do some FX. Unfortunatly I have to admit that is wasn't a good idea. Indeed, juste by doing the obvious things, there is many work to do in a limited amount of time, and my blindness will probably make me fail to complit all FX in the 3 shoots...

But here we are so let's share some FX works by chronological order

Cyborg decloak

It was the first FX done on this project and this alow me to test learned particules workflow.
I like to have less objects node as possible and every FX from one event in a same object node. It create big networks but with a little organisation it is totaly fine. 

I am still not completly satisfied by the particules, but nitpicking is only good when you have the time too do it. So let's move on !

Ground Destruction

Wow, this one was hard for me...
Many trouble, many test, a lot of time in it to get a correct result. Indeed, I often had exploding sim, wrong constraints behaviors, and clusturing probleme. Fortunatly i took the Mastering destruction FX from Rebelway abd i tried to apply learned technics on this project while doing the cours.
I Finaly had a decent simulation after 2 weeks and rushed the smoke simulation to move on an other FX. Again, sparce time lack.

I used a mix of glue and hard constraints to get bending and feeling the size of the Monster, then the result was uprez in a second simulation.

The finale simulation without smokes

While the environement was rendered in Redshift, I also used it for this FX to avoid to match ground's material.

Monster Roar

I created the smoke dust in 2 simulations. The first one to have a velocity field from the roar, the second to raise the dust from the ground and have better sources.

I used the velocity  of the first simulation to selecte the fast moving density and firiction on the ground in order to used it as density source in the second simulation.

Then, the finale simulation was used to advect particuls and RBD on the ground. Some spit and drool will be added to enforce the strength and sit the effect in his environement a bit more.

In front of this strength, a protection is needed ! Therfor, I added a body shield made of multiple layer:
-Velocity from Breath
-Ripple from velocity
-Thermal friction
-Cracks

Thermal friction are placed manualy to simplify the fx and go faster, but i admit that it could be cool to do it procedurally. Currently, the FX work but i will probably past some time to get a better look.

Cards where placed on cracks to mimic light rays.

It's been a long time I didn't post anythig and I realised it was only the preproduction !
I originaly wanted to post my work by movie's chronoligical order, but to be honnest, until now, I realy struggle to get the right look for the ground's destruction (I will speak about it latter). So, for now, no major FX is completly done but, (apart the ground destruction) the first part of the movie is, I think, on the good way! 

So let's start with the environement !

Environement

Initialy , I only setup the floor to be able to work on the fx without thinking about environement and to avoid losing too much time on it. After having done some FX work, I decided to finish the environement in order to be able to setup my light right and  be ready to render the first part of the movie. 

The ground

The ground : nothing fancy. It's made with heighfield toolset and once meshed, with some manual editing.
Then, I added few megascan's assets and a rock floating stairs.

Stairs

The stairs are made with a box, copied on a line with "pscale", "scale" and "orient" attribute's randomization.
Then bend and edited a few time, finaly re-meshed with SideFXlab voxelmesh and polyReduce.
Attribute Noise, used to displace the geometry, was also used many time to give a rocky and more natural look.

Floating Rocks

In my moodboard and amount my references, I clearly scketched ideas of an environement magically destroyed (maybe, by a portal or a blackhole style orb). So, I created many floating giant rocks with voronï fracture on a displaced box, where I just kept a little amount of voronoi's pieces

To itemize, explode view sop and a random scale & rotation were applied on each piece with the primitive sop node combine with a blend sop to controle the amount modifications.
Multiple voronoï fracture and subdivition were used to crank up the details on the biggest rocks to try to give a understanding of scale

Finaly for the rocky stuff, little rocks from megascan were scattered on the ground and in the air, as little parts snatched by the portal !

My rocky environement dressed, I shaded it with 4 layered megascan's shader in redshift.
Unfortunatly, my megascan plugin wasn't working because of my Houdini's version (18.0.460 version, and I can't upgrade it for redshift license's reasons). Then, I decided to write a little Python script in order to convert the principal shader created by megascan into a redshift shader. 

The look is not fully matched but at least, I dont need to copy/past every single texture path of my 17 megascan assets and perhaps more in the future.

A second script were made to assign material witout erasing the other one. So I could switch from one Render engine to an other if needed.

PS : I'm realy a nooby at cooding so it might be a messy code. But it works in my case ^^ 

1 - Shader convert
2 - Assigne material

Once my scene will be lighted, big rocks would be rendered separatly and projected on simplifed geometry or cards as matt painting for optimisation sake.

The orbish Portal

The environement was dressed but there wasn't a clear magic feeling on it because the orb/portal was missing.

Most of this Fx was created in sop. The shell ( rwo1, image 1) and the streams lines (rwo2, image 1) are completely done using sop nodes : points vop, blend and attribut noise. The rest are hybridation of pop simulations, using basic behavior, previous created lines, to drag particules, and sop post processing.

In order to shade my fx with consistency, I came up with a clean point vop with age, velocity and noise parameters for both color & Alpha. Point vop still need work to be fine because I always add nods( curvenum color intensity randomisation, curveu energy flow ,etc), but it is a great starting place.
Converting this point vop into a wrangle would be a good thing to do, to save it as preset instead of HDA , but at a cost of slower modification in the future. I still don't know how to save it efficiently.

With add of clouds and a sky-rig, there is the result (viewport render) 

This post is more long that I was expected, so I'll see you in a few day to speek about our main goal : FX

Some things are already done but, I will try to speed up a bit... April is not that far anymore :)

    As a big fan of the Warcraft universe and immersed in the new World of Warcraft extention  "Shadowland" ; I decide to drive my FX work with many references from the Blizzard universe.

Story

    A character (let's name him "Bob") is about to complete his journey in order to find the void essence to craft an infinite source of power ! Nevertheless, the border guard will not let him pursue his quest : no man shall pass !

Reference work

I decide to setup  my scene in the void border or a kind of magic rift. Mainly inspired by Wow "Legion" and "Burning Crusade"  style, I also find some references in the Riot's game "League of Legends" and in "Diablo III".

I used PureRef to create a Mood/refBoard in complement of Miro in which I alredy had a board with plenty of FX references.

    To create visual contrast I decided to use complementary colors. My environnement was in a Cyanish / Greenish  tones, so the monster will have a similar one to enforce his origines.
As a complementary color, our famous Bob will use a magic red dark theme. 

I found this kind of magic style in World of Warcraft again, and a bit in Starcraft II for the Hydralisk

Then, I quickly drawed some concept art (as I was able to) and sketch animations to have a better apprehension of my project. 
 

At this stage, i still need to do more concept art about energy flowing on the Monster and Bob

Managment

    I also made a "mind map" and a "to do list" in Miro to visualy see all the Fx I have to do ! 
It will help me to manage my time and focus on the mains tasks.

Still in progress