The Never's Fire VFX Recreation

This project was a part of my journey through college learning to create high-quality VFX within Houdini through various independent study projects. My goal for this project was to recreate a professional-quality fire FX shot from HBO's series The Nevers (shown below)--from shooting my own footage to work with, creating the FX elements in Houdini, and finally compositing it all together in Nuke. 

Element Breakdown

Initial Burst

The initial burst of fire was probably the element of this shot that took the most iterations to get just right, but I'm quite happy with the result of that hard work. The setup that ended up working the best for me was creating the source of the burst and the velocity of the burst separately in order to maximize the control I had over the shape it created. I started once again with a sphere, utilizing its normals to create an outward bursting velocity field. I then clipped the sphere to only retain a section of it, repeating this 3 more times to get the 4 sections of my butterfly wing velocity field.

I then used a simple attribute wrangle to adjust each section of the velocity field to get the kind of asymmetrical butterfly shape I desired before merging them all together to make one velocity field. After this, I applied 2 noises to the velocity to break up the shape and make sure the fire was not super smooth when shooting out. Then all that was left was to use an attribute transfer to transfer the velocity onto my base fire source geometry, which was relatively simple— a cluster of small deformed spheres copied to points through a pop net where the fuel would start before bursting outwards in the direction of the velocity field.

After that, the refinement of the initial burst was essentially just me slowly getting the hang of the pyro solver and figuring out through many tests how to adjust certain parameters to get my desired shape. My biggest saving graces were disturbance and turbulence, both of which really helped to finish the job to make my fire burst look and act like the flames in my reference shot. All of that trial and error finally left me with this!:

Flame Shell + Flame Streams

The remaining hero elements of the shot after the initial burst dissipates is what I like to call the flame shell and the flame streams, which are essentially the streams of fire coming out of the character's hands (aka me in the final shot) and the resulting floating sphere of fire in the middle.

For the flame shell, I utilized a spiral geometry to create a circular ring to emit the fire from. I then threw a poly wire on the curve and added some variation to its thickness by using an attribute vop, and got a nice spiraling velocity field by key framing the spiral spinning and trailing the velocity from there. After that, all I had to do was once again fight with the forces in the pyro solver node in order to minimize the amount of flames licking off of the ring and try to get it to stick to the base geometry as much as possible.

The real life saver for the flame shell was combining it with the flame streams coming from my hands. The flame streams were relatively simple in construction, they were both comprised of identical partical systems emitting from a small sphere geometry. The velocity for these spheres was directed in a line in each of their respective directions towards the flame shell, deformed and given a bit more variation through a point noise node. Then, I just played with the pyro solver forces once again to minimize the chaotic behavior and contain the flames as best as I could. They don’t look that impressive on their own, but once I animated them along with the flame shell to move in tandem with my hands from my base footage, the elements melded together to create one interactive ball of magical fire.

Sparks

The last element I created for this project was the sparks that burst out from the initial flame and linger around for the rest of the shot. For this sparks setup, I created 2 pop sources within my pop net, both of which were driven by the velocity field I created for the initial burst. The first pop source created a group of particles that bursted fairly far outwards and died off quickly afterwards. The second pop source created a group of particles that didn’t burst out quite as far and that lingered for much longer before dying out. Another notable difference between these 2 pop sources was the gravity forces being enacted on them. Usually I try not to mess with the gravity force too much so I don’t take away from the realism of their behavior, but the pixie dust sparks required me to bend the laws of gravity just a little bit— I ended up lowering the gravity force being enacted on the second pop source by a fair amount, which finally allowed for those sparks to float around and not fall to the ground quite as fast.

After the initial spark creation, I had to also add some splitting sparks. This is something I haven’t actually tried my hand in creating before, but it was very interesting to figure out! Thanks to a collection of SideFX resources and online tutorials, I was able to create a varying splitting sparks geometry from copying a line to a random collection of points, and then copying those line clusters to a random percentage of sparks from my main burst. I keyframed some of the parameters on the splitting spark group creation node in order to dictate how long the splitting would occur and also how many splits would appear.

Finally, finishing off the sparks was just a couple noises and attribute vops to vary the width, color, and intensity of the brightness of the sparks.

Compositing

Once I had all of my elements rendered out, I went to Nuke to tackle the final part of this project to bring all my previous work together in one cohesive shot. This was my first project compositing my effects on top of real-life footage, so it was quite the interesting and fun experience to learn!

I began with the base footage that myself and my lovely and very helpful friend had worked to shoot together at the start of my project. This footage was very rudimentary, consisting of me acting in the shot as the caster of the fire magic while my friend held up an iPad and a phone with a bright orange background on them to try and cast some orange light on my face and body. So, my first step with that footage was to go into After Effects and roto mask out my friend holding up the lights and also clean up the background with a static shot we took of our filming location. Then, I had to also create a more detailed roto mask of my hands in Nuke so I could mask out the areas of the fire that should be blocked by them as they move. 

From there, my compositing work was focused on unifying my footage along with the effects elements to make them look like they all belonged in the same environment. To achieve this effect, I did a fair amount of color grading on the footage and also animated some additional glows to enhance the base orange lighting on my face and body to get that bright flickering lighting that should be created by the fire magic. Along with that, I played around with the contrast of my fire VFX elements to bring out the brightest areas and get some nicely detailed flames, adding a generous amount of layered glows to make the fire shine as an energetic hero element of the shot.