FX TD Showreel

FX TD Showreel

FX showreel made during my time at the University of Hertfordshire. Some of the work is what I was responsible for in my final year film Swarm: FX, pipeline, rendering as well as the compositing for the wand magic shot and the lighting for the tape shot. Other work includes some personal projects done this year between my university project work. All FX done in Houdini, Solaris and Karma for lighting and rendering, and Nuke for compositing. Find the breakdowns of some of the projects below.

Underwater

Personal project creating a walking 'animation' of an octopus on the sandy sea floor using vellum in Houdini. First iteration tried to use a base animation in kinefx as a guide for the vellum sim but it was very chaotic and hard to control. Instead I created a procedurally animated attribute that ran down each tentacle at an offset to each other to control a force in the solver. The force direction was sampled from a user drawn curve, additionally there were other attributes, masks and forces on the tentacles to curl the tips of the tentacles, to create a motion to move the tentacle up and down as well as making the tip 'feel out' the surrounding area of the ocean floor. 

To simulate the underwater fluid behaviour, using the animated octopus, a smoke solver was used to create the velocity field of a fluid simulation. This would be used to advect the points in the sand sim, the sand volume as well as the floating particles.

Sand and sand volume was done with POP grains and the pyro solver respectively. I procedurally modelled five variations of sand grains each with a different shape and shader, which were then point instanced in Houdini Solaris over the POP simulation. Sand volume was a simple smoke setup using the past velocity field to advect the smoke. Lighting and rendering done in Solaris and Karma.

Responsible for all (Vellum, POP grains, Pyro) except octopus and scene models.

Octopus model belongs to: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/art/realistic-octopus

Scene models and texture belong to: https://polyhaven.com/a/coast_rocks_05

Centipede

Personal project using kinefx to create a procedural walking animation of a centipede. User drawn curve guides the centipede. IK step drivers are animated along the curve using VEX then the whole rig is deformed by the step drivers in a full body IK. Mesh is procedurally generated over the rig curves then captured and deformed onto the animated rig. Antenna are simulated over the animated mesh using a vellum solver.

Plants are attached to their own central curve in a vellum sim to keep them upright with basic pop wind and drag. Lighting and rendering done in Solaris and Karma.

Responsible for all (KineFX, VEX animation, vellum) except tree, scene and plant models.

Tree: https://polyhaven.com/a/dead_tree_trunk_02

Plants: https://polyhaven.com/a/calathea_orbifolia_01 and https://polyhaven.com/a/fern_02

Scene: https://polyhaven.com/a/sand_rocks_small_01

Magic Sceptre

Sceptre magic shot from my groups final year film Swarm. Basic idea was to show the sceptre activating and charging up by absorbing energy to be released at Jakob our creature. I was responsible for all FX layers as well as the shading, rendering and compositing of this shot. Due to the lensing effect of black holes a lot of RnD had to be done to give the lens warping effect. Karma lacks the same support Mantra does for VEX shading so creating some sort of ray marching setup like other artists have done using Mantra would not be possible for use in Karma. Instead multiple layers of transmissive 'shells' were used each sitting inside the other to create a lens. Inside the shader, a fresnel was used as a mask and along with other math nodes, the output was used as the IOR of the lens creating a similar effect to that of a blackhole.

Rendering each pass seperately with a deep pass would not work due to the deep samples being stopped on the outside of the lens. More Rnd had to be done to seperate each FX element into layers for compositing. I rendered a ST map using the lens in front of it as a way to warp the background plate and smoke and stone layers.

Responsible for all CG (POP, Pyro)

CG Tape

Due to the changing animation, I needed to create a procedural UV tool to generate a repeating set of UVs for the CG replica of the tape so that I could control and change where the tape was on the wall without repeatedly UVing each tape piece. Above video shows some wedges done to hone in on the correct stiffness, bend and break values for the vellum solver to match my reference of the real tape.

Responsible for tape FX, (vellum), shading (tape only), lighting, pipeline and rendering.

Elephants Toothpaste

Custom mask built on age and viscosity controlled the look of the foam in a pyro shader. Meshed version of the sim was used as the liquid layer at the start that then dissolved. This was used as a source for the pyro sim to depict the smoke generated off of the foam in the reaction.

HDRI as background: https://polyhaven.com/a/workshop

Flower Simulation

Live brief set by Electric Theatre Collective during second year at university. I completed this seperate to the live brief as a personal project in the summer. I created a procedural rigging system for the petals and leaves, it created a KineFX ready rig for each element. This allowed me to create multiple animated attributes using VEX to use as masks for the prerotate and prescale functions in a rig wrangle. The attributes travelled from the root to tip and unrolled the rig of each respective leaf or petal. 

Each set of petals were given a random time offset to avoid a very 'CG' looking animation. Using a joint capture and bone deform on the original geometry resulted in my guide animation. I used this guide animation as a reference geometry in a vellum solver to attach the simulation geometry to and simulated the flower closing to solve the intersections. This was retimed in reverse which was then used as a guide animation in another vellum simulation. This workflow was repeated for the stem animation to rotate and scale the stem and leaves.

I textured the petals in photoshop and rendered in Karma.

Responsible for all (vellum, KineFX, VEX animation) except the flower model

Flower Model: Provided by Electric Theatre Collective

Vine Magic Simulation

Work for a project based in UE5 creating a game cinematic. I was responsible for the vine simulation done with vellum in Houdini. As it was a prerendered project, I was able to use baked alembic files with no need for it to interact in realtime. Each iteration was in response to the main teams feedback and as it was to be used in a realtime engine, polycount needed to be optimised. It used two layers of simulation, one to establish the motion of each bundle of vines then a second to simulate each individual vine.

Responsible for vine simulation only

Cinematic: Bound By Blood

Thanks for reading :D