Adrián Guzmán - Student Demo Reel

Hello everyone!

I'm Adrián Guzmán, 21 years old, and in my final year studying Visual Effects. It's an honor to be part of the Rookies Awards 2024. Today, I'm excited to show you some of my favorite projects. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did making them.

Thanks for your attention and support!

First of all I would like to share my reel, where I include what I consider my best projects. Later I will develop some of them to learn more about their creation process.

Mad Max Chase

This project is inspired by one of the most emblematic scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road.

During its creation, I was able to put my Pyro and particle skills to the test in Houdini, recreating a full simulation of ambient dust, a full-scale sandstorm, and all the fire simulations surrounding the vehicles.

Breakdown

Before starting on Houdini, which is where the majority of the work on this project is, I had to go through Maya to develop realistic animation for the vehicles. For this I used a plugin that allowed me to rig them and simulate their movement.

Without a doubt one of the most complex tasks was recreating the sandstorm on a full scale. To do this, I generated a large wall about 100 meters high and 200 meters wide with an animated noise that emitted particles following a velocity field. These particles function as an emitter for the pyro simulation, which is divided into 3 sections to reduce cache time.

Generating the trails for the wheels of the vehicles was not easy either, since the smoke had to acquire the speed of rotation of the wheels to be emitted correctly. To do this, I initially generated a simulation of particles that would function as an emitter for the pyro. In addition, very slight dissipation was required to generate a dust cloud, which greatly increased the size of the simulation.

The composition in Nuke was decisive in achieving the final result of the project. I worked almost all the elements in layers to have greater control over them, in addition to adding a large amount of fog that made the integration much easier.

Tsunami

This project is inspired by the movie Interstellar, and in it I was working for the first time with fluid simulations in Houdini. Without a doubt so far one of the biggest challenges I have faced given its complexity and how heavy the simulations can be.

Breakdown

For this project I first had to make a consistent animation for the ship. To do this I created a low quality fluid simulation and converted the ship into a rigid body so that it adopted the movement of the waves. From here I kept the animation of the ship to later use it as a collider in a high quality simulation.

In the first shot I separated the base wave from the fluid simulation to later integrate it into Nuke. To get a good splash I created a speed field from the normal of the wave that I used as an enhancer of the impact effect with the ship.

In the second shot I needed a large number of particles to achieve a very high resolution of the fluid due to the proximity of the camera. Without a doubt a very heavy and complex simulation to achieve high quality whitewater.

Traveling Bulb

In this project I mainly focused on developing a striking lookdev but without leaving aside the simulations, mainly using vellum hairs to achieve the effect shown.

Breakdown

One of the biggest complications of the project was capturing a movement in the light bulb that simulated that it was floating on a somewhat turbulent fluid. For this I used it as a rigid body on a low quality fluid simulation and, later, I was left only with its movement. Once I had the movement I used it as a collider in my vellum hair simulation.

To create the background effect I created some particle impulses to use as an emitter for a pyro simulation and thus achieve a shockwave that would drive the light bulbs and move the “hairs” in a sweep.

Inception Street Destruction - Technical Project

In this project I tried to create a destruction simulation based on a famous scene from the movie Inception.

As a technical exercise, it was very complex to develop a system of custom velocities that controlled each of the elements of the scene in order to make them explode on several occasions and at the desired moment.

Breakdown

I divided the simulation into 2 main parts. On the one hand I worked on the entire destruction of the wall that remains in the background, while on the other hand I developed the destruction of the fruit shop.

For the wall I created a complex system of constraints between all its surfaces and, in addition, some secondary pieces that would serve for the additional explosions that occur throughout the scene.

For the fruit shop I made each part have its own controller to indicate the force and moment of the explosion and thus be able to control the rhythm of the whole. Additionally, some pieces have a second division for secondary explosions.

Thank you!