Close Call

FX project: Close Call

This is a personal FX project made in Houdini and using the Redshift renderer. The plane and its textures are sourced from CGtrader and the HDRI used was from Polyhaven. I animated the plane, did the meteor Pyro simulation, and created the clouds/fog volume in Houdini. They were then rendered using Redshift and composited in Nuke.

Breakdown

It took me roughly two weeks to complete this project. Firstly, I animated the meteor and simulated the splitting of debris off the rock with the help of Houdini VOPs. Then, I applied a Pyro simulation to them. The challenging part was getting the meteor trails to look realistic; my first attempts either had too much heat, too much temperature, or too much debris...

After finally getting a good look on the meteor and setting up the scene, I was given advice from my lecturer on how to improve the overall lighting, and how to make the elements look realistic. 

As such, I gave noise to the meteor simulation, played around with the lighting, and I tweaked the settings in Houdini's new Skybox Node to make the clouds look realistic.

Compositing

Lastly, after rendering all the layers in Redshift, I composited the EXR frames into Nuke. During compositing, I encountered errors in rendering (e.g. extra lights on the wrong layer) and so I had to go back into Houdini to re-render. To incorporate the plane, fog and meteor properly into the scene, I had to do a lot of color correcting and grading.