Mud Slide and Bomb Explosion RnD

Been Working on these two tests/RnD in the past week.

The Mud/Chocolate Slide:

This is my first major test of Phoenix FD (PFD) which is a Grid/Voxel Base fluid solver that works inside of 3DS Max so that means theres no need to go into Realflow to do sims. Defiantly not a replacement for Realflow but a good tool for an FX artists arsenal. While Waiting for Realflow 2014 I decied to make a Mud Slide with PFD as Realflow 2013's Hybrido solver does not support viscosity, however this will be added in Realflow 2014. I Rendered it to look like chocolate as it seemed cooler! PFD also can do big sims like splashes with whitewater like Foam and Spray which again is amazing to have this inside of Max.

Bomb Explosion RnD:

This was an explosion I made with Fume FX inside of 3DS Max to show my college teachers the quality of digital explosions I can produce for an upcoming project which was based on World War One which now might be based on World War Two!! Quite a high res sim took around 2 H to sim and another 6 to render. Its using 4 Pflow Emitters the first 3 are the exact same that are emitting particles 360 degrees to give quick bursts of fuel where as the top emitter emits upwards with a bit of divergence and then deltes to create the cool mushrooming firey cloud on the top.

Lego Explosion Test:

Also Off Subject I also did a small explosion based on the Lego Movie using a low res Fume FX sim to drive PFlow using Fume Fx Follow. The Particles are then instances of lego bricks which were baked out and key-framed the colour on. Pretty Simple and looks ok-ish!!

Thanks For Looking!

Battleship Explosion Shot- Unfinished

Been working on this shot for the past week or so, but due to now working on a WW1 themed project at college I decied to comp all the renders of this shot so far so I can focus all my efforts onto that project.


This was actually a second version of a shot I was working on this one been the improved version.

Version 1 of the shot, Which was Scrapped!

Method:

I started out with layout, nothing crazy, just the Battleship asset and a HOT (Houdini Ocean Toolkit) Ocean surface.

Then started working on setting up a basic PFlow system to throw debris out from the explosion, this was then baked using PFlow Baker ( a free script for Scriptspot.com).

Then I started working on the Fume FX and this was my first iteration of the Fume FX sims:

Everything's lowres however I wanted fire at the end of the smoke trails as well as more trails, so I used the Spawn operator to spawn trails that lasted only 2 frames, these trails would emit fire for 2 frames which creates fire on the end of smoke trails, quite a good method for doing smoke trails with fire on because you can specify how long there fire trails are due to the age of the spawned particles from the initial particle birth event.

You Can see what that looks like here:

The Fireball itself is pretty simple, based from 3 PFlow soruces emiting a few frames from the last, the Smoke turbulence was controlled by an effector but I think I went overboard with the fire turb which caused the smoke to look really noisy towards the end of the shot as the fire is generating smoke thus inheriting its velocity to the smoke.

The Final Fume Sim took around 3-4 Hours to sim And was rendered out in around 7 Hours.

Next Was Rendering the Geometry, All objects and cameras were locked down so in each scene file the objects would be the exact same which is vital when rendering any Animation/VFX shot. My Fume FX Simulation was rendered with Max's Default Scanline Renderer, My GI Pass was rendered with V-Ray as well as the ocean and ship and the snow particles were rendered with Krakatoa. So 3 Diffrent Render Engines for this shot.

A big task was the ocean, My usual ocean shading techniques were not working for this shot:

Iteration 1

Then I tried another shader setup  I have been experimenting with to get fake surface foam using a cellular noise map:

Iteration 2

Too Tropical and Foam scale is too small

Better but to translucent and desaturated.

Added a Sea Bed (Plane) to give the translucency a better look. Looks Good!

The Ship Rendering was pretty basic, The Turrets were more metallic where as the ships body was less reflective to give a kind of rusty feel. You can see a big Sphere which is actually casting a fake shadow on the ship for the Fume FX Sim!

And After All of this was done, The time had come to Render and Render and Render!!! And then some Comp in After Effects.


Final Shot:

Thanks For Looking!

Tank Mud Splash- Realflow R&D

Hi Guys,

This has been my side project for a few weeks however I have ran into a stumbling point due to my limited computing power an i5 and 16GB's of RAM. So I need to upgrade. However I am planning to re do this test with a lower particle count and render the full sequence out.

The Sim is based on a tank driving through a puddle (A Rather Deep Puddle) of mud. This sim was using Hybrido in Realflow 2013 which is so amazing. However the particle count of this sim was so high as you can see from the screenshots, it was taking nearly 45 mins a frame even when using Proxy mesh for the Tank Collisons. After Frame 32 The Sim Crashed But I managed to recover one frame with its mesh and render a kinda turntable out so you can see how extreme the mesh is and how good Realflow is at meshing fluids.

I also just want to add that I am starting to do a lot more ambitious projects now and trying to add more details to get my shots looking production quality so my RnD turnaround will be slowing down, for example right now I am doing a Battleship Exploding which is Testing for my Showreel short film which I will be creating for the main part of my reel starting later this year.

Also I have plans for some other "big" project shots which I want to get looking really good so basiclly just thought I would say the blog my be a bit quieter as I take more time with each shot!

Thanks For Looking!