Month: April 2022

The second sim is a gas explosion. I want the explosion to expand fast in first few frames and then keep rising to form a good shape. The emission should be pretty hard at first and disappear slowly.

I firstly made a rough sim to test parameters and the range of explosion. The first test has a lot of problems: bad shapes and bad emission, the speed of buoyancy is not satisfied enough.

After that I adjust the sim to get a better result. I also add a shockwave to make the ground sim more interesting and interactive.

I then build a scene and an animated camera to fit with the explosion. At first I tried to render it with arnold. However, it takes about 20min to finish one frame, which is way slower than I expected. Therefore, I turned to render it with redshift, which is a faster GPU render engine.

The volume shader in redshift is not as good as the one in arnold, which took me a lot of time to finish the shading. After rendering, I composited it in Nuke, adding vignette and grains on the shot.

Below is the compositing breakdown:

Zhenzhong told me that the color of the explosion may have some problem. I also think that the color of flame is too bright. I will test this short again to make it looks better.

In the first week our team focusing on the background research and storyboard.

We changed part of our script and make it shorter than the old version. Due to the limited time, we finally decide to make a movie trailer, which will last about 90 seconds. Therefore, we can pay more attention on our shot rather than rendering.

I firstly did a research on our characters and the environment on pinterest to gather some ideas. What I focused on is the suit of our character and the key color of environment.

After that I drew the storyboard based on the key shots in our script. I use a combination of drawing and photoshoping to create my storyboard, which can demonstrate the shot and the atmosphere that I want much clearer.

Our team will have a meeting next week to decide which part of the storyboard and concept fit our requirement. After that we will start to design and make our characters and environments.

In the second week, I decided to finish my first pyro explosion simulation: Spiky Explosion.

After adjust the velocity and divergence fields, I finally finished the sim.

I then adjust the spiky explosion shape to create several explosions and layout them in a scene. Unfortunatly, the sim is too big to be rendered on my computer (500*500*500*4). Therefore, I did a flipbook instead.

The sim still can be improved in the future. For example, I can add some sparks and RBD smoke to create a more detailed sim. Recently I am satisfied with the result. I may improve this scene in next few weeks if I am free.

The next sim is gas explosion, I will make a sim and then render it out and finish compositing.

I decide to use my knowledge to make a cinematic shot by myself. I choose one shot in Blade Runner 2049 as a reference and recreate it.

I firstly rebuild the scene with some assets. For example, the scifi vihicle in the movie and some building. The scene is quite stylish, which covered with fogs and dust. The lighting of the whole scene is also quite stylish, which takes me some time to recreate the atmosphere. I choosed redshift as the render engine to get a fast result.

I also built some stones in Houdini and randomly layout them by adding some random/noise attributes.

I finished the smoke simulation in Houdini after I built the whole scene and animated the vihicle.

I then rendered the sequence with redshift, and then composited it in Nuke.

The main idea of project 2 is to make a small project to test a personal creative/technical methodology as “a proof of concept”, which can be considered as a preparation of our FMP. Therefore, I decide to test and dig deeper into some visual effects techniques that may apply into my FMP in the future.

What I like to do in my FMP is an urban legend (or creepypasta) theme short film. The main idea of this film is to tell an abnormal or horror story. It is quite different to other horror topics like zombies or ghost. The film may base on some ideas from Control, SCP (Secure,Contain,Protect), The Backrooms or The Thing.

In project2 I’ll dig deeper into some visual effects techniques of my FMP topic. For example, smoke and fire (for explosion, fire, guns or environment), CFX like cloth/soft object (for creatures) and distructions (for environment). I will mostly focus on these three parts.

The main purpose of this project is to solve the special effects problems that may be encountered in FMP. I will do a deep research on urban legend subjects and their application on films. I will also try to figure out how to make shots for horror urban legend theme films based on some materials and research.