Final Submission
Breakdown
Research
My main objective with the personal project is to bring together the elements we’ve learned in class into one big project. I’ve never created my own simulations before, so I wanted to try making an explosion in Houdini.
This was my reference board for the project. I wanted to find a cafe with cozy lighting to contrast with what was going to happen on the street.
Filming
I had a basic filming setup. Maggie graciously helped me out by being my actor. We filmed with some gaff tape as markers on her sunglasses.
Explosion in Houdini!
For the explosion, I used a pyro burst source from Houdini itself. I chose a muzzle flash shape so that it had a bit more length.
After adding a timeshift, I converted it into a vdb from particles and converted the vdb into a polygon.
I then plugged the points into vellum to create pattern variations and I played around with the vellum settings so that certain bits of the particles would stick together when it exploded to ressemble debris.
Afterwards, I added trails to the particles so that when it exploded it would create the smoke trails that we often see in explosions. I tried different lengths, and this one felt the most realistic to me.
Once the particles were set up, I turned them into a volume with the volume rasterize attribute node. It is when the smoke starts to form in the viewport.
Here are the nodes that I did afterwards, I removed some particles at certain timings to have different layers of smoke
I then added a visualizer to test what the smoke looked like with colour.
The most important bit after setting up would be plugging it into the solver. I downloaded the axiom solver that uses the GPU to render instead of the CPU and so it is slightly faster. Playing around with the settings allowed me to create a softer smoke
This was what the smoke looked like before I added in a material in the render.
This was my first time rendering with karma! I set up a camera, brought in the scene and lights. Then I built a pyro shader for the explosion, which I’ve shown below:
I’ve also made a proxy environment in Maya. I couldn’t figure out how to make the explosion interact with the environment. My next step will be to create the exploding building andadd a shock impact ring coming from the explosion.
Compositing in Nuke
To prep, I separated all the plates by shots and did a lens distortion with a grid that I filmed.
Shot 1:
I 3D tracked the plate and added a card to replace the section where people were walking. But while I successfully removed the people from the shot, it also took away a corner of the book, so I had to roto it back over the plate.
It was during this phase where I felt like the explosion felt too artificial, but at this point it was already too late for me to go back to make changes and render on time, so I wanted to complete the project first and go back to refine it later.
These were the nodes that I used for rotoscoping the details.
After cleaning up, I rendered the plate and started to add in the explosion. Once everything was placed, I roto’d everything else back over to retain some of the detail covered by the smoke.
After everything was done, I went on to add extra details such as merging the glass reflections back on and adding a bit more reflection of the smoke in the reflection of the door.
Shot 2:
For the second shot, I had to comp over two plates: one behind the phone and one on the phone screen.
On top of the smoke that I rendered from Houdini, I also added different masks of other wisps of smoke to add some additional depth to the explosion. I also graded it so that it is less intense and played around with the different timing of everything. I made sure to match the two plates so that everything would be consistent.
I edited a video that I filmed outside of the cafe, then added an iphone camera overlay on top of it and exported it into davinci resolve. I realized that I didn’t have actual footage from the phone, so I took some creative liberties with what I replaced the screen with. I added a transition in the beginning so that it would look like the camera was still turning on and the timing was just enough so that I could get away with having the footage be still and not moving.
These were my nodes for the greenscreen clean up and screen replacement. I used a keylight node to remove the green, removed the markers, and added the reflections back on top of the replaced phone screen. I wasn’t too happy about the tracking that I did, I will definitely go back to fix up the tracking of the phone screen itself and the roto of the hand back over it.
Shot 3:
This was the most challenging shot for me because I forgot to film a clean version of the sunglasses, and it made getting the details in the reflection really difficult during cleanup.
To offset this, I made the base blurry, so even though you can’t see her eyes anymore, at least the markers are gone, and the reflection from the footage is crisp. I am still trying to figure out a better way to fix it and I will work on it when I refine everything!
Sound Design & Colour
For sound design, I had to remove most of the original sound because I was cueing Maggie to time her reaction with the explosion. The background noise was also too loud, and it would be much easier to handle a separate room tone. I added some sound effects of her placing down the book and her phone on the table as well as the explosions. I also chose to use some elevator music because it is lighthearted, and you won’t expect what comes next on a seemingly calm day.
I also didn’t do much with colour grading this time, I converted the DJI colour space D-Log M back to rec.709 and liked the look of it so I left it untouched after.
Critical Reflection
The personal project felt like a journey of self-discovery to me. Since this is my first year learning anything CG-related, I felt like I spent the majority of my time figuring out all the technical aspects, and I didn’t really have time to stop to think about what I really wanted to do in Visual Effects. With this project, I can confidently say I really enjoy compositing and want to pursue a career as a compositor.
As for the project itself, I felt the detrimental effects of “we can fix it in post”. I realized a lot of things I needed once I started compositing; I keep catching myself thinking, “Oh, I wish I filmed this like that.” But this project really challenged me to be creative in my problem-solving; I felt a great sense of satisfaction every time I was able to come up with a solution for something. For example, for the shot of Maggie picking up the phone, I didn’t have a shot of her doing that action, so I reversed a clip of her putting the phone down to match cut. Simple solves like this teach me to think of problems from different perspectives and to think more positively when facing issues, so I am glad I am developing my soft skills in this project.
One thing I wish I had more of was references for explosions; it was difficult to find references for explosions on a smaller scale, and I think that made it hard to gauge what my simulation should look like. I also narrowed the scope of my project because of time constraints; I wasn’t able to achieve everything I wanted. I definitely learned and practiced everything I’ve learned in Nuke so far, and I felt like everything was starting to make sense to me now. I also want to learn more about rendering; I think having a good render setup makes a big difference in the final results. I had some difficulty rendering my explosion with Karma, and I will keep hacking away at it until I understand it. My project is currently still a work in progress, and my next step is to refine it further. I would like to add an impact shock wave and recreate the hanging flaps in 3D, and run a more advanced simulation so it looks more grounded and realistic.
For the exploratory unit, my main issue is managing my time. Whenever I plan, I forget to include time to figure things out, and it often pushes back my projected timeline. My goal for the FMP is to create a proper timeline and stick to it as much as I can. I have already started building an environment, so hopefully I can stay on schedule this time!
Moving forward, I would like to make a more realistic explosion that interacts with a 3D environment. I would love to do more simulations in Houdini, refine my rotoscoping and tracking, and apply everything I’ve learned from this project to my final major project.
Quick disclaimer:
This was my initial idea for the personal project. Since I enjoyed modeling the crab for my previous project, I thought it would be interesting to challenge myself by creating a CG character. However, a while into pre-production and post-filming, I chatted with David about what I should focus on for my portfolio and thought that I would be better off taking a more realistic approach to the project. Although my final has pivoted from this idea, I still wanted to feature it in my blog, and I plan to revisit it after graduation.
Research
This is my Pureref board for the project. Early inspirations for a fairy character.
I wanted a magical forest environment with a flower fairy. Playing around with the concept of a small creature/ being in a world too large for her. I thought that it would be interesting to explore creatures made out of existing plants and flowers, and drew inspiration from existing artworks using flowers as dresses and outfits.
Storyboard
For the story, I wanted to convey a hopeful message that not all hope is lost, even when bad things happen.
We begin with a fairy tending her beautiful garden, which she is very proud of. As she finishes her gardening work, she heads off and a leaf falls down to seemingly transition the shot.
Once she completely leaves the garden defenseless, we see the shadow of birds hovering over it, and more and more join in until the screen is completely covered. When the birds leave, the garden is completely destroyed, trampled on, and uprooted. The fairy comes back to see this in her horror. However, she doesn’t let this dismay her, and she begins to clean up the garden. After cleaning up everything, she lifts up the last leaf to reveal one small sprout.
Test Stills
These are shots from Heartwood Forest in Sandridge. I converted the raw footage from the camera into Rec.709 to see if I liked the colours and the composition of the shots.
I think that the green really pops out because of the lack of leaves on the trees, but I wasn’t too sure about the cut-down tree trunks. I will be reshooting some footage in May.