Go Beyond
Responsible for all FX, shading, environment, lighting, rendering, compositing.
Character and rig by Artem Dubina.
Posed by Céline Molière.
Programs used: Houdini, Nuke.
Rendered with Karma.
It is the first 2D-style piece that I have attempted so far. I found myself really inspired by the increasing number of experimental, stylized films that have been produced in the industry lately and wanted to give it a shot as well. So far, I have neither worked from a concept directly nor under someone’s art direction. While I was definitely enjoying the process of full creative freedom, I also thought that trying to recreate a concept and making it justice would make for good practice. I decided to reference a sequence from the anime series: 'My Hero Academia', for which I, after seeing the full fight for the first time, immediately decided that I wanted to recreate these effects, whether that be in a 3D or 2D style.
The entire process was done in Houdini, with a few adjustments that I made in Nuke and for which I, once again, used Houdini's Karma render engine. I decided to approach this project without a ToonShader or heavy comp work. All the 2D elements in the render were accomplished in 3D.
The fire was simulated with a standard Pyro Solver. After I got the dynamic movement that I needed, I converted volumes to polygons and made some adjustments to geometry.
Ice was modeled from a basic cube shape. Taking the angle between neighboring polygons, I created a mask on the edges of the cube and combined it with noises to create a pattern that I used to shade ice. I scattered points around the character's foot and instanced every ice cube on these points, randomizing its shape, rotation and pattern.
Masks for textures on the floor.
The outline on the character is a curve that I rendered as black ribbons. In order to get this curve, I created a mask from the difference in point normals that are facing camera and point normals that are facing the opposite direction. Using this mask, I cut the geometry where values are crossing from positive to negative, and then deleted polygons and points that I didn't need.
Using the same technique, I created a mask for the 2D look of the clouds. In order to get the shape of the clouds, I attached a lot of small spheres that have random noisy shape on a big squeezed sphere and applied several noise deformers.
Process of procedurally modeling and texturing the stadium.
In order to get action lines, I scattered points on the outline that I made beforehand and copied randomized lines on these points.
The final touch on this shot was creating this “curtains” that give the action and energy feel to it.
I had a lot of fun figuring out ways to achieve this look. I had to step out of my comfort zone and use techniques that I never thought of beforehand, which was a very interesting process for me. I find myself continuously impressed by just how amazing this software is, which allows you to create anything you can think of and Go Beyond, Plus Ultra.