Project 46 Chaos Enceladus

Final entry with sounds

for now my final entry until i feel like changing anything 

after over 350 hrs of rendering time 
its finally done  

i've been working at it from  2nd Feb till 24th march 

I know im 20 ish days early from deadline but my renders were super heavy and i didnt want to have more frames with less quality, i wanted to have few frames with best possible quality i can do .

For the time and knowledge i had at the time  this is the best i could do

and finally I hope you all will like what i achieved here in such short period of time, I know i am really happy with the look and feel i managed to get out of it.

And  special thanks for everyone who commented on my progress here and my other social media platforms, and thanks for my friends for all the feedback over entire past few months..

This was an awesome opportunity to push myself to maximum over very short period, 
Thank you rebelway and rookies for the chance..

I hope this will help me with my dream of becoming an awesome fx artist.

tc, stay safe

~ no dream is too big and no dreamer too small ~

so past few days i was rendering nonstop, i cant really stop and work on compositing or anything  i might not have enough render time in the end so instead im going to render everything i have finalized and once thats out of the way i will work on compositing and if i have bit more time i can add  more elements or improve shots

   
almost done with first shot left with about 20-30 frames ( which is my primary goal so i will have more than minimum required frames after i got that out of my way i can work on more )

did lighting tests for second shot (shield shot)
got something similar to what i was looking for with bit of compositing i think i can manage it 
this image is only geometry layers shield i have separately to have more control on compositing stage

here is one of the references i really like will try to achieve something similar

so turns out when i render i did not like what i saw , it was so ugly i had to redo 
and honestly my motivation went pretty low after seeing the results, 
in the viewport and flipbooks it looks pretty okay and i was happy with that i had 
but the render is a whole new story. So after few hours of beating myself for wasting entire weekend slowly started grinding at it again and came up with whole new game plan,

So the idea is simple, a shield made from energy and power, That absorbs the hits from the creature and eventually disappear with a burst. ( you can see the process from the few  clips i put together)

shield has couple of base energy layers
and some additional layers of particles  partially to keep generating overtime  and absorbing and redirecting 
any force that try to penetrate it .

here are some new inspirations for the shield 
mainly its from scarlet witch's red magical power and  (video clip 4.28 minute time stamp)
tony's mark 85 shield (0.09 time stamp)

In Other side of new, I am rendering  first shot every night/when im not using my pc

most of the layers are almost done rendering, except for the dust and smoke its extremely slow with every optimization i can think. I have researched hours  on many forums and sidefx help guide but the sad truth is volumes are expensive to render and heavy ( and i have alot of dust and smoke layers, to be fair the sim looks amazing  you can check it from  here below

So i believe my only options are complete 2 shots i'm already working on 
then render and polish it off.

Second is to continue doing rest of the fx and render with whatever time left once im done what i can with fx

im not sure which one to do 
 

I played around with some render settings to see what kind of settings i need to have to get a fairly good quality render with low to no noise, i kind of figure it out 

then came the biggest problem i have currently to render my smoke sims  it takes about around 1hr per frame during the peak moments  so i have about 200 ish frames, its a huge problem for me.

 If i start rendering now  i might be able to finish up the first shot , but i wont be able to do rest of the shots .

in any case i will try out settings and optimize bit more  and render every night as much as i can and do second part  at least il have shot shots  (400 ish frames )

so after some initial render test of the first part 
i move on to the second part which is the defense shield  blocking the attack from creature

so after finishing up the first part i wanted to test shaders, texture lighting 
roughly and setup some basic comp  to see how is the render time 
and get some idea what im dealing with 

this update i wanted to do the roar interaction with the dust and debris layers so that entire shot i can wrap up,

after few iterations and playing around i got what i wanted , and raising up dust  fx  was too generic previous version so i scattered points on the creatures back and source dust from that so it makes more sense 

for dust to source from it, it gives better shape and silhouette 

so hopefully this is all for ground destruction and scream/roar breath fx

next step would be humanoids shield and attack back

for now i'm not really worried about textures because it comes with textures and i can tweak not going to spend too much time doing complex texturing and environment i will  be running out of time 

and its a fx challenge and i want to be a fx artist so my main focus is fx everything else comes after im ok with fx parts

This update i wanted to get most of the dust, debri and ground fx done
im almost done now, optimizing smoke  took me a lot longer than i expected 

but in the end i managed to optimize it a whole lot saving my disk space 

core dust/smoke simulation is not final but rest is coming together with good collision and behaviour also i like alot its matching my ref which i have uploaded here few updates ago

after finalizing debris layers next step is dust and smoke
so this update i started working on smoke and dust

I had to do spend way too much time cleaning things up and optimizing, as you can see my destruction is not the lightest sim. it is pretty detailed like i wanted and it cost a lot of memory and power , fortunately i'm done with it but a lot of element has to interact with it and based on that destruction.

so smart thing to do is optimize it as much as i can and make it use less memory . i achieved it by deleting everything that's not in camera frame, then clearing below y -1  because no one is going to check it and deleting a lot of unwanted attributes...

making my source creating necessary attributes and fields to work the physics do its thing

but its still only one layer planning on doing several,
long way to go :D

Breakdown of the debris layers

This update i focussed more  debris passes ,
i planned doing 5 passes of debris according to size and velocity
very small, small,medium 
after compiling all those 
on top add a general debris field and smoke
most of the debris are done still working on smoke and general field 

after smoke and debris il be focussing on shield 

So my previous ground rbd  some pieces are too big and too heavy,

so  i had to play around more and get a suitable behaviour with not too much bigger parts 

also i did further research on possible fx elements that i could implement overall, 

and get more general idea how i can continue

after several more iterations this is what i have for now 

its getting closer but still not there yet 

i have few more ideas to control it going to try it out next

Hi im a recent graduate

after finishing some of my projects  I am finally entering this challenge, a lot of fun to play with and experience how real world FX production goes. I am using Houdini and for all the simulations. for the main ground destruction reference for now I'm looking at, few Mandalorian shots, and Witcher first episode the creature in the Forrest, and hobbit

But for no im still not sure about layout, and im running out of time since im already way behind . But it looks alot fun and so many good entries... so i had to try

So im setting up main ground destruction, for now im  going with a little wet and dry natural land terrain, So no man made  structures on the ground

I am planning on layering ground to get good chunks,clusters,dirt smoke and debrie so theres a variety of things to make the sim looking interesting...

After figuring out basics of new rbd tools in houdini,  I am now testing  bit more advance options and settings to customize rbd further,

its my first time using  houdini 18 so most of the new things im  completely blank lol,

adding more customized speeds and spin

Testing new collision methods in H18 and little bit of guided sim