Victor Lamache - FX

Hi, I’m Victor, an FX student in my third year at ArtFX Montpellier. I'm glad to share with you my first entry to the Rookies Awards. I hope you enjoy my work!

Dr Strange

This year, I wanted to take on a more challenging project, both in terms of hard skills and teamwork. A friend of mine wanted to recreate a scene of Dr. Strange opening and going through his iconic portal. I was responsible for everything particle-related (simulation, rendering, reflections for the rest of the room).

Compositing & Matchmove : Jonas Jochum

Environment : Adiren Clavelier 

Prep Matchmove : Adélaide Calabrese

Shooting Help : Jade Mesquida

                                                                    Particles Only - Comped

For the particle simulation, it's a classic POP Sim, using different noises based on the height position of each particle. It was also a bit tricky to get the particles to stay on the ground at the end. I decided to simulate all the particles in a single simulation, which didn't help with getting the timing of their disappearance right at the end.  Thanks to the photogrammetry of the room, we could use the mesh to get accurate collisions adn enhance the presence of particles in the real life.

Jonas Jochum, DOP & VFX Supervisor on set, took the time to create a photogrammetry of the room, allowing us in post-production to relight the room with accurate reflections.

I decided to render the particles in Redshift for time optimization, I was able to iterate faster and get the right look we wanted for the particles. We were able to render at about 1min/frame with motion blur. 

Fire Simulation - Axiom

One of my goals this year was to create a realistic simulation of fire. The objective was simple: learn everything from scratch and create the best fire simulation I could. I decided to use a simple bin and set it on fire. This straightforward example allowed me to focus and learn as much as possible.

I had to choose whether to use the tools SideFX provides with the sparse pyro solver or to use Axiom. Since I had just acquired a powerful new GPU, I thought it would be a great opportunity to iterate faster and deeply understand everything this "new" solver could do. Fortunately, we have amazing experts in this field: Urban Bradesko and Fabian Nowak. They both provide excellent resources for fire simulations.

I decided to use photogrammetry for the bin. I took several pictures of a bin near my home, edited them a bit in Lightroom, and uploaded them to Polycam to get a 3D textured mesh. After some cleanup in ZBrush, I had a decent model to work with.

I created detailed sourcing, multiple levels of detail, and variations. I painted the area where I wanted the fire to be emitted, scattered points, and randomized density and temperature with noises at three different scales, three different frequencies, and three different amplitudes. I rasterized everything to get a volume that Axiom could use as the source for the simulation.

I rendered everything in Karma to utilize the great pyro bake volume and achieve efficient results with volume rendering. I made multiple renderings: one in a lookdev scene, allowing me to clearly see the smoke density and how it would look in real life, and another more cinematic one in a dark scene with nice reflections on the ground. I decided to do both after consulting one of our supervisors, who advised me always to present pyro work on a light background to show the full capacity and visuals of the simulation.

River - Birdbox Inspired

This year, I also wanted to start creating my first environment. I was really inspired by the movie Birdbox and the amazing fluid simulation they had, and I wanted to present a river sim in a complete environment.

I learned a lot about fluid simulation, especially meshing, and of course, about environment creation, which I had to learn entirely on my own as we don't have any courses or supervisors in the FX specialty. The compositing was done by Jonas Jochum. 

I unfortunately had to render it without any atmosphere due to the render time with Arnold. The atmospheric layer was added in compositing.

I created the tent in Marvelous Designer and textured it in Substance Painter. The vegetation and other assets are from Megascans.

I had a lot of back and forth with this project, but I'm glad to have produced something that works overall.

I simulated the water in pretty high resolution and was able to upres the simulation at the end using the vorticity attribute to add noise to the fastest parts of the sim and get some nice crispy details.

There are still many things to learn, especially about white water and all the environment aspects, but I'm overall proud of what I've been able to achieve in my spare time !

Participating in the Rookies Awards has been an incredible learning experience. From creating a realistic fire simulation using Axiom to developing my first environment inspired by Birdbox, and working on a challenging group project recreating Dr. Strange's iconic portal, I've grown significantly in my skills and knowledge. Each project pushed me to explore new techniques and tools, and I am proud of the results I achieved. I am excited to continue developing my abilities and look forward to future opportunities to showcase my work. Thank you for considering my entry, and I hope you enjoy my projects as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Thank you !

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