Space Pyramid Rise- FX Project

Hi Guys,

This has been my biggest and most challenging VFX Project yet, Making a Giant Pyramid (From Outer Space!) Rise out of the Ocean! My inspiration came from Igor Zanics RISE Project as well as Important Looking Pirates (VFX Studio) Work on the OLF Commercial.I wanted to push all my VFX Skills from 2014 and make a Production Quality Shot.

Creation Of the Space Pyramid-

The Space Pyramid was pretty simple to make, Start off with a Pyramid Primitve in 3DS Max, then using RayFire Voxels Modifier with a bit of Chamfer to create the rounded edges on each Voxel IE Block of the Pyramid. This was what is used for the fluid collisions, at render time using Max Clankys Greeble Modifier, that then took the Poly Count of the Pyamid up to over 2 Million, but you can enable it at Render Time only which is great!

The Space Pyramid- With Greeble in the Max Viewport

The Space Pyramid- Render with Greeble

RealFlow Sims-

After watching Igor Zanics RISE and the OLF Commerical Frame by Frame aswell as alot of ILM and Scanlines work on Battleship ( I watch that daily anyway!) I knew that the emphasis of the shot would be the spray/whitewater cascading off the Pyramid, I wanted there to be little fluid mesh if any on the Pyramid as due to its size and the speed the water on it would be falling All the Water would ethier be Spray or Mist. I notice this in a lot of the shots on Battleship, when you see a big splash theres little fluid mesh there, because at that velocity and voriticity the water would be in a mist/spray state rather than liquid. To get this effect there are ways to mesh your particles by velocity however I found a much simpler option (More on this below).

Splash/Spray Reference, Notice no/little liquid and lots of Spray (Photo- BBC)

The Scale of the RealFlow Hybrido Domain was quite big, a lot bigger than usual which then means more RAM is needed and longer sim times, However I did add more scale to the core fluid sim using low gravity and some vorticity boost (Got to be one of the best Hybrido Features!) I did have a few problems with the Pyramid collisions so I switched to RealFlow Shell Mode to avoid random particle explosions even when using higher substeps, so I added some more interaction factor values to get the collisions working well. 

Core Fluid Sim In Progress

For the Bubbling/Swirling on the ocean surface before the Pyramid Rises, I came up with a way to do this using FumeFX and RealFlow 2014s new Ocean Force Daemon. Basiclly if a large object underwater is rising to the surface, theres lots of bubbles also been pushed to the surface which creats the swirl/bubbling on the surface, you can see this in underwater Volcano eruptions. For Igor Zanics RISE Project he used a Houdini Pyro sim that is then advected to FLIP, theres no way of doing that in RealFlow right now, So all I did was a basic lowres Fume smoke sim, of a small PFlow emission shooting some partciles into a grid and the using a VelMutipler of 1.5 to get more mushrooming on the smoke, also some turbulence, then rendered this from a top view camera of the grid. This is then used as an Animated Texture in the RealFlow Ocean Force Daemon with the strength tunred up and is positioned where the Pyramid will breach the surface, I was really happy with how this worked out! The Final Core Fluid sim had around 38 Million Particles.

For Secondary sims I used Hybrido Splash and Bubbles as separate sims, these ended up been really high particle counts but not creating the amount of spray I was after, I used lower gravity, drag, wind and noise to make them have more motion rather than just dripping off the Pyramid. For the main Spray I decided to use RealFlows standard object emitter using dumb particles, emitting ott the Pyramid only when it breached the surface, then using high wind and noise to make it cascade off the Pyramid nicely. I was able to cache the Spray to Alembic, however the Splash and Bubbles sim I could not stitch the alembic files for some bizzare reason, My Inital idea was to use Krakatoa and Frost to mesh the PRTs into tiny spheres, however due to there been over 40 Million whitewater particles which means lots of polygons been created at render time it led to lots of crashes, so I decided to render these through Krakatoa as particles and match the lighting as best as possible, I also rendered the Spray pass through Krakatoa as Voxels, to be used as a mist pass in comp.

 The Inital Foam Sim Was To Swirly, I had to get rid of some of the big clusters^

Object Emission Spray

The Particle counts for the whitewater sims got into the 50 million mark at one point, I wanted a very dense cloud of cascading spray from the Pyramid like in the OLF Commerical, I think using the object emitter worked really well because dumb particle sim quick and work well for doing spray. The Hybrido Secondary emitters worked well also, mainly for the foam/bubbles.

Some Of the Daemons used to give the Spray/Splash More Turublence

RealFlow Playblasts

Rendering-

I started rendering Space Pyramid Rise just after Christmas, I had got my new workstation also so I transferred over 2 Terabytes of cache data so I could render on my new machine. The meshing was done in Frost, as mentioned before all the water on the Pyramid itself was going to be whitewater or spray, to get rid of the mesh on the Pyramid from the core fluid sim, I used a slice modifier animated so once the bubbling of the surface had died down and the pyramid was rising the slice would clip off the top mesh.

Slicing where the mesh will turn to spray

I used Extra Tex Map and refraction passes from V-Ray to have velocity shading on the fluid mesh, For the waves I decided to use Fractal Noise, which seemed like a good way to avoid tiling on the ocean, however the waves dont move exactly like waves. I need to look into using HOT (Houdini Ocean Toolkit) But without tiling. For the Ocean Shader I used my custom ocean setup, I did some tests again with an SSS Ocean but its not worth the render time, V-Ray Fog works just aswell for creating the Attenuation/Depth effect, however Attenuation would be barely visible from the cameras position.

Fluid Mesh Render Test

 Fluid Mesh (With Box to Matte the Mesh Volume + Extended Ocean Plane)

Frost Mesh Settings

The Krakatoa passes were rendered in there own scenes, The Alembic Proxy spray pass was also rendered in its own scene however the fluid mesh was reflecting it. Both the Mesh/Ocean and the Particles were lit by a sky HDRI, I did a few tests with diffrent shaders, using some reflection but no refraction as it just increases the render time for little effect.

V-Ray Alembic Proxy (Splash Sim from my Plane Crash Shot)

I was really happy with how V-Ray Proxy looks, I saw great use of it on Graham Colliers Submarine Breach RnD.

Spray V-Ray Proxy Render WIP- With Lighting Refrences

Compositing-

For Compositing I wanted to have a finished shot with sky, infinite ocean etc. rather than just the render on black. The main comp work was getting the spray,foam,mist passes working well together aswell as blending the fluid mesh pass with the extended ocean pass which was a large plane with the same noise modifier on, however it still needed some manual masking to blend together. I did quite a few iterations in comp, I initially added a mountain in the background to break up the horizon of the ocean, however I didn't like this so to extended the ocean right off to the horizon I blended from the extended ocean render into a still image of an ocean, however its so far away and blured due to DOF you don't notice the waves are not moving.

 Comp V3- Not Final Version

A quick annotation to show where the Ocean Blends to the Mesh and The MattePainting of the sky and horizon ocean.

I also decided to show the Shot on black so you can see all the spray/mist a bit clearer-

Here is an earlier version of the comp, I scrapped to recomp because I felt the quality of some passes need re comping, also I wanted open ocean rather than the matte painting horizon I initially made.

FINAL SHOT

Thanks for Reading, This shot was done over 1.5 Months On and Off, I've just started working on a Game Trailer, however I have some ambitious ideas for personal FX projects in 2015!