Marc Abad Jiménez - VFX Student

Hi Rookies!!

I'm Marc Abad Jiménez, 20 years old and last year VFX student. Since I started the degree I've heard a lot about THE ROOKIES and I've always wanted to make an entry, so here we are! I'm excited to share my project with you all and would greatly appreciate any feedback you can offer.

First of all, I would like to show you my latest reel. It includes what I consider my best projects, showcasing all the effort and dedication I've put in over the years.

So this is my reel and I hope you all like it! I also want to apologize for the bad compression it has.

Now I'll breakdown the RBD project since it was the one I enjoyed the most and then I explain a little bit of a Procedural Tool I made which I used in a few projects along the course.

THE CRASH SCENE

As I have just said one of my favorite FX techniques is Rigid Body Dynamics (RBD), and I believe I've showcased it exceptionally well in this project. This project not only pushed me to enhance my RBD and FX skills, but also improved my scene tidiness, patience, and optimization strategies.

BREAKDOWN

After settling the layout, the first step in creating an FX scene where we want to destroy things is to, well, destroy them. I started by making the RBD material fracture, which required selecting the perfect values to accurately recreate both wood and glass materials. This involved careful tweaking of parameters to ensure the destruction looked realistic and convincing, capturing the distinct breaking patterns of each material.

As you can see the car hitpoints and wood breakpoints in the glass have more pieces to give the simulation more detail and optimize it as well.

Once we have the pieces into which we want our asset to break, we need the constraints, or in other words, the 'glue'. This was a very meticulous process that took many hours.

But the difficulty wasn't only in making constraints and grouping them; the tedious part was simulating all of these pieces and constraints. One change in a constraint group or material weight could drastically alter the simulation, causing it to not break, or break from the right or left. Creating this was like completing an engineering degree.

After hours and hours, we finally have the sim you have seen before :) 

Now we only needed to create a simple Pyro simulation.

 To explain it briefly, I deleted the geometry based on velocities so that we only had emission when the car crashed. Then, using this geometry, I assigned Pyro attributes to rasterize it, and with that volume, we had our emitter.

GEM TOOL GENERATOR

During my degree I've started noticing that all the procedural world, in which Houdini is pioneer, started to seem very appealing to me.

This is why I usually try to add some procedural aspects in my scenes, for example the one you have seen in two of my reel projects , the "Procedural Gem Generator".

I want to warn in advance that it is a very simple tool but it was my first touch into the procedural world so it is special to me.

The idea of this is to create an easy manage tool for creating Gems instantly with only one input, that could be whatever geometry you want to (better if its simple).

This tool can make a gem with this detail from a 4 point box in only a few minutes tweaking parameters. I think it is a very simple but effective tool.

First of all we have our base geometry, then, with a toggle we could chose if we want to create a new random shape, or just continue with our base geo.  The random shape mode is a simple copy to points, our geometry are the points we are going to use to scatter a box(which maybe could be other geometry)

In this case I continued with the base, next step is to create edge damage, in my case I decided to go with Labs node.

Later on, we have to do the crack, creating an IsoOffset and scattering some grids with a mountain noise should be enough to next do a boolean to recreate the texture that.

Then some bevel, PolyReduce and exploded view to make the cracks a little bit more notorious.

And the final touch! Changing our Edge Damage method from Boolean to VDB. This will provide more detail to our geometry

For the project I kinda procedurally textured the Gem using measure node and calculating curvature and other attributes to transfer them into Karma Material. This could be a future upgrade of the tool.

Thanks for your attention and I hope my work inspired you.

You can fin me on LinkedIn, Instagram and ArtStation