Based on a Client Brief, I worked on this spot from Start to Finish in 1 day. The Spot is based on a Film Rental website that has Low Prices Hence the Spot name, Destroying High Prices.
Method:
The Setup was pretty simple, The Camera animation was done first, Start with establishing the text pull out and look up at first UFO then Second. The UFO Animation was then done, also the laser which was just a cylinder parented to the UFO's (I Modelled and Textured the UFO asset earlier this year). I then used Rayfire for the Destruction of the Text when each laser hits it. Once I was happy with the scene setup I Locked It.
Main Scene
The Explosions were done in a separate scene using Fume FX, very basic Particle Src Emission, not mega high res sims.
Fume FX Scene
Render was with V-Ray, Geo Pass, Fume FX Pass, Laser Pass
Comp was where it all came togther, lots of keyframing Motion Blur, Colour Correction to the Explosions and then the lens flares were done some using Magic Bullet Looks, but most were using the CC Light Rays and CC Light Burst Filters in After Effects all Key framed.
Hi Guys, Just a quick RnD I have been working on, I really liked Animal Logics "Lego Brick Water" into the Lego Movie, I completed this R&D within a day. Using Realflow for low res Hybrido sim which is caching out as PRT Files with Velocity. Then Loaded into 3DS Max via Krakatoa PRT Loader and use Magma Modifer for Col by Velocity, Then used Frost for meshing using a simple piece of Lego model, then used vertex colour mapping to get the Col by Vel to show on the Bricks.
Magma/Frost/Mtl Setup, See Vertex Map in Diffuse Slow of a "Shiny" Material to get the Col by Vel to show in the render.
Pretty basic test, am sure there could be some pretty awesome things done with this, I may try some but am busy at the moment!
I have started working on the very early stages of my big ShowReel Project (More to come on this soon). However I ran this sim in the background as I have been always wanting to get a nice looking foam/wake pattern for this type of shot.
Pretty standard setup in Realflow, the Core fluid sim had around 10M particles so was not that high res. The Ship is just moving through the water in 100 frames, I also have a cylinder emitter parented to the back of the ship emitting more fluid into the domain which simulated the Ships engines like a pump emitter would in Houdini.
Core Fluid Sim
Then I used Splash and Foam for the wake, Dumb/Ballistic particles are defiantly a no go for this type of shot there no control and you get lots of particles randomly exploding. I switched to using liquid particles for my splash and foam sim. I increased the velocity and surface tension a bit but the particles were just been created and then sitting on top and not spreading into the nice pattern you usually see with a boat/ships wake. So I created a new node tree based around the splash and foam sim. I added two attractors ethier side of the fluid container, these attractors used a small value of 5 to pull the foam slowly towards them thus revealing the pattern of the foam and making it look nice. Also added in some K Daemons for any fast moving splash particles.
Splash&Foam Settings
Extra Nodes added to Splash and Foam Sim.
I meshed the sim in Realflow and brought back to 3DS Max for rendering. I used my ocean shader for the ocean, and a normal V-Ray Mtl for the ship, also some GI but all rendered in a single pass. The Splash and Foam was rendered via Krakatoa and lit using Environmental lighting use the HDR map I used to light my V-Ray Render.
I also found in Comp if you lower the opacity of the splash and foam particles the snowy look goes away and it blends in with the water a lot nicer, I ended up lowering it to 55%.
Decided to do a Fume Shot as I have been doing a lot of Realflow stuff lately. I also Decided to put in a Plate instead of just leaving it on Black like usual.
The Sim consists of 3 Emitters, The Fireball, The Ground sand/smoky wave, and the Trails. The sim was very quick due to changing 4 settings which decrease the sim and render time massively.
Quality and Max iterations do not need to be on default settings most of the time, I lowered the quality from 5 down to 3 and the Max Iterations down from 200 to 70. Next Rendering Tab I Increased Step size up to 200% but left the fire at 50%. Lastly in the Illumination tab increasing step size to 180.
This made a huge impact on my Sim and Render time without loosing any noticeable quality in the sim or render. Thanks to Anselm and Fabian for this info!
Grid Size/Res:
Gradients (Smoke is using Colour Caching, Smoke colours are set in each Particle Src)
Next was Composting:
In After Effects I added a lot of colour correction to enhance the sim as well as blend it into the plate. One of the main things I did was add Sharpen and Grain to the Fume Render, this really enhances the smoke detail and fire detail. I added a lot because I knew the H264 Video Compression will hide a lot of it, also the upload compression as well. I Recorded a video about the Compositing stage:
A few months ago I got asked by Next Limit to take part in the RealFlow 2014 Alpha. This was an amazing oppetrunity considering I am a 17 Year Old Student and Realflow is used by very big studios in Films,Games,TVC's.
Late last year I did a Sea Monster jumping from the ocean shot, this was when I was quite new to Realflow, It had a lot of problems, Bad Meshing, Splash&Foam looked very fake and almost like powder, Water Shader was not good there was no refraction in the shader. So for my RealFlow 2014 Project Shot I decied to go back an redo this shot. I made great use of the new meshing tools aswell as better object interaction (see more below). There a lots of new features in Realflow 2014 the headline feature been Viscosity in Hybrido which I did some testing with, I will upload some of that soon. However this is the Making of: Sea Monster Splash RF2014 Project:
I started with the same Realflow Cache I had from last year of the sea monster jumping and then splashing back down, it was very simple animation within 3DS Max. The "Sea Monster" its self was quickly sculpted and painted in Mudbox.
Loading up Realflow 2014, Next limit have done an amazing job on the UI and new toolbar Icons. Not sure how detailed I can go into this right now due been under a NDA but let me say the UI looks Like RF2013 with an awesome paint job. The Scene Set-up was realtivly normal A Bounding Box for the container, then a duplicate of it sat on the base for the emitter. I started by doing low res sims that I could turnaround within around 1 hour these sims had just 800,000 Particles so I could make adjustments without having to do a high res sim each time, thus wasting lots of time. After adjusting some mainly trying to get the Gravity right becase in my last test the gravity was way to low, I then ran a high res sim which took about 8 Hours on my Workstation (See Below for Specs).
High Res Sim Iteration 1
As you can see, the container is to small, the KVolume node also I have to admit I got worried the gravity was to high before I ran this sim so early in the morning I got up and change the value down to 4.5, you can see the splash looks not to bad but is hanging in the air to much. So while annoyed at the time wasted I reset the values, pretty much started again with a bigger container and more particles than I have ever sim'd in my history of Realflow. After Another Day I got this:
With these improvements, I know that its not perfect and maybe could last another 40 frames or so but I did not have the time of HDD Capacity. So I started working on the Splash and Foam pass, Using Liquid Particles this sim was very fast and I was getting nice results straight away. The Splash and Foam sims were also cached out as .PRT files so that I can render them with Krakatoa and also colour them via KCM/Magma Flow Colour by Velocity.
Awesome Looking Foam!
Next Was meshing, in RealFlow 2014 meshing is a lot more faster and proves for a more iterative workflow when it comes to meshing. I am able to view mesh value changes in the viewport without having to rebuild the mesh each time. Also due to having high poly mesh you can use a cube to mesh only the area inside of the cube which is a lot like region rendering, it saves you meshing the whole mesh like the region saves you rendering the whole frame.
A Still Of the Mesh in the Max Viewport
Next was back to Max for rendering. I imported my RF Mesh, SD animation Cahce, Krakatoa PRT Splash and Foam Particles and also Created an extended ocean plane.
3DS Max Scene
With my RF Mesh I added a HOT Modifier on to create the ocean waves surface I then duplicated the same modifier onto the Splash and Foam PRT loader aswell as a Plane which will extend the ocean in Comp. A lot of my work in Max was on the Water Shader. I used V-Ray and a custom Shader I have been developing for a few months. In my other Realflow projects my water has look very translucent on the splash, this translucency has been kept in the alpha channel which causes a big problem in comp. See Below.
However I just faked it in the end by putting an object behind the ocean Mesh and making it invisible to camera but visible in Reflection/Refraction. Problem solved! Some WIP's of the render.
Once the water shader and Sea Monster Mtl's were sorted I set this off rendering overnight. After That I did the same with the Extended Ocean Plane. The Splash and Foam was rendered in Krakatoa using the same Magma KCM setup as I have showed previously.
Final Step- Compositing
The Bulk of the compsoting work was getting the Extended Ocean plane to blend with the RF Mesh Render. This was pretty hard due to the camera angle. In the end after lots of Colour Correction filters trying to match them, I also added in custom animated paint to get rid of the hard edges, also I used 6 masks all animated to hide the blend.
I also added a bit of camera shake using an After Effects Wiggle Expression: wiggle (3,20); also a fake zoom just keyframing scale. I also erased/softened some of the foam as there's some random particles spawning on the surface even before the breach so I just painted them out!
Thanks so much to Next Limt for this amazing opportunity. I can't wait to play with the Release Version of RF2014 and will be using it on upcoming projects.
