FX Reel 2014 from YungHurd on Vimeo.
Breakdown:
Ironman 3 - Smoke Trails, Fire
The smoke trails from Ironman's thrusters were simmed using Houdini's clustering method. The sim boxes were long in length and arranged in series with a little overlap between them.Before simming was possible, I had to re-animate the geometry and camera. The sequence involves Ironman falling from the sky, yet the CG camera had no spacial movement and the character was moved around to match the screen. So I chose parts of the geometry to calculate a flight direction (a vector), and from that create a true animation path. The camera was later parented to the new animation.
The fire was just a cone geometry with a shader and motion blur to look like fire.
Call of Duty: Ghosts - Bullet Trails
The "ghost mist" trailing from the bullets is just one long gas sim that is copied on each bullet with offsets. The black mist is more turbulent while the white mist has a more "streamy" feel to it.
Jack and the Giant Slayer - Mist Model
The mist is simply a SOP volume box with fractals generated by VEX nodes. I then used ramps to control the overall density based on distance. The movement is just animation along an axis.
Tron: Uprising - Derez, Rigid Bodies
I developed Houdini tools for the derez effect used on the characters. The trouble was doing the effect while still having the original animation intact.
There were 3 levels of geometry; what has already derezzed, what IS being derezzed at this frame, and what hasn't been derezzed yet. The geometry that has been derezzed will just be run through an RDB sim. The geo that is being derezzed will be created in the sim at that frame. The remaining geo will just be a collision object for the derez cubes.
The character was converted to a point grid with boxes copied (a tetra solid), and then cookied with the original geometry. For the tool, all the artist had to do was animate a closed grouping object, like a sphere or box, that will engulf the character. Geometry inside the object will be derezzed. The result was one "pre-cut" geo with point attributes that represent the 3 levels mentioned earlier, and also an animated "remainder" geo which was just the leftover animation. These were then run through the RDB sim.
Ender's Game - Dust, Debris, Lightning Network
The dust was made using a proprietary volume tool that used spline curves. The debris is just simple particles.
The lighting network propagates through each spaceship. A network of lines was generated from a point cloud using a nearest point method from VEX nodes. Then a few points were manually selected as the starting points and put in a starting group. By converting this point group to a primitive group, then back to a point group, you get the propagation. Putting this through a SOP Solver, frame attributes are given to the points. Then the straight lines were given some noise.
The lighting network propagates through each spaceship. A network of lines was generated from a point cloud using a nearest point method from VEX nodes. Then a few points were manually selected as the starting points and put in a starting group. By converting this point group to a primitive group, then back to a point group, you get the propagation. Putting this through a SOP Solver, frame attributes are given to the points. Then the straight lines were given some noise.