Missile Explosion

This piece of artwork was inspired by the 1994 film True Lies featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger during one of the final shots where the bridge gets blown up by missiles. Using my skill set to the best of my ability I was able to design a basic bridge model with added FX simulations such as pyro explosion, rbd simulation, and basic chop network setup then moving it to the compositing phase.

01. Modeling

Most of the ideas and references of the model were based on images I searched throughout Google as I looked for easy builds due to minimal knowledge and reduced time creating the bridge model.

All of the modeling was done throughout Houdini as I simply used a curve bezier than poly extrude from the object I created. I then duplicated it to make the seemingly extraordinary bridge shown in the video.

As far as the ground I used a simple mountain attribute noise and painted only the section where I can place the bridge model on a flat surface. 

I made a model for each part of the bridge before grouping them together so they could have their separate fracture before importing them into the simulation.

02. Texturing

I was able to group part of the models and assign them textures using Megascans. These textures were able to be used for the ground, support of the bridge, rails, and road for pavement. 

These brilliant textures with displacement and normals created color to the scene while adjusting the UV wrap so they could all fit into fruition. 

03. FX Simulations

After completing the texturing I then started the simulations from the model I made. Starting with rigid body simulation with the bridge then pyro with the explosion adding sparks in the end. 

I then began working on the missile making a quick model to begin adding a chop network to follow the curve I made. This then followed a quick RBD sim on top of pyro simulation customized with a popnetwork for added turbulence on the missile.

04. Compositing 

I rendered each part of the project in layers using Houdini Karma such as the bridge, explosion, sparks, and ground in their own layer to make a custom color grade with each of these assets. I made sure each render pass had an alpha channel to adjust if necessary.

I added a shuffle mostly through the explosion to adjust a bit of glow on the temperature changed the grade of the smoke and merged them together. 

I added a blue image to display the sky while using a shuffle for the depth of the ground for reduced visibility and colorization far in the background. 

05. Final Thoughts

I  learned a lot along the way while creating this project hoping Arnold is pleased with this being blown up. I realized there was a lot more that I could have added such as having an ocean simulation, but with the timeline, I noticed that each project should consist of reasonable awareness of how long it would take to complete each pass starting with the model and then going towards FX simulations and lastly compositing.