The Creator

Inspired by one of the scenes from the movie "The Creator", this project was created and rendered in Houdini (Karma), then post-processed in Nuke.

I must mention, that I had to dive in some tutorials to achieve this final version, but mainly from "Epic Environments tutorial" that can be found in Double Jump Academy with William Fiorentini.

The inspiration came from this picture, which was taken a screenshot from the trailer in Youtube, in order to use it as a reference guide at the background (Inside the camera) and start from there.

The instructor gave us the camera and buildings already modelled in Maya, as you can see in the second picture, and I just imported them to Houdini, assigned some textures that were purchased from artstation and hit a render test in Karma mtlx, just a quick testing at the moment and I noticed the angle of the camera, size and position of buildings had a huge difference from the reference and it became kinda hard to modify them.

So, in order to have more control of the geometry and camera position, I decided to create all by myself inside Houdini, the main buildings, arc buildings and camera position, from cero procedurally generated. For the camera position I found a very old tutorial but very helpfull to use fspy software, which allows to get the perspective parameters from an image and then import them into any 3D software. In this case into a Houdini camera. But also I was struggling with the camera position, size, scale, because this method was not perfectly precised. And that affected the whole process, specially textures and lights because they were out of scale. So I had to move to plan B. Start all over again (yes).

Plan B.

I already had the main buildings, so I brought them in. Then I placed a grid as a road, a Bus and Tommy for that human scale reference. Then I moved my camera in order to fit the overall scene. Great! Now I got perfect scale.

I brought every asset into a LOP Network in order to convert them into USD files and then assembly all in Solaris. Some assets are from Big Medium Small like the Hornet spaceship, some others are from KB3D (Aftermath, Wreckage and DMZ). The main building are created procedurally in Houdini.

At the end, all was assembled into the Stage context and ready to render out. Everything sounds easy in the description, but after a few file crashes during the process, long render times and some information found in other tutorials, finally I could put everything together. I also whould like to fix something like the background which is too bright and foreground too dark, but that will be for another version of it. I have learned a lot, I feel happy of the result and I am really excited and looking forward to create new CG content.