The Clash
Responsible for all FX, environment, lighting, rendering, compositing.
Characters and Animation: Mixamo.
Programs used: Houdini, Nuke.
Rendered with Karma.
The Clash is a project for which I wanted to challenge myself by creating multiple different simulations in one scene. It would have been difficult to get all these effects to work together and make them feel like they belong to one world without Nuke. I definitely sharpened my compositing skill and had some good practice with rendering out AOVs.
One of the things that I had the opportunity to explore further from working on this project was the TOPNET. Having to wait for each simulation to cache, I got to dive into TOPs to have several simulations running overnight.
The look development for the crystals was a challenge that I hadn't priorly anticipated. I experimented with several ideas: Using Mesh Lights as scattered sources of illumination, then Point Lights, creating emission texture maps - none of them gave me the result I wanted. Eventually, I came up with the idea to exclude chosen dome light from affecting anything in the scene apart from the crystals. Since that light is still visible within their reflections, refraction as well as subsurface, we can see them illuminating and creating the feel that I hoped to convey in the scene.
The process of modeling the cave was pretty straightforward. I started with basic sphere and later deformed it with different noises and applied boolean using another deformed sphere. The model turned out to be very high resolution to capture all the details, so I had to create a mask from camera view to reduce polygon amount in the areas that are not visible.
I wanted to get depth of field blur in camera without rendering depth pass. For that, I needed to create a VOPnet with simple math functions to get a "button" that would control which of the character I want my focus to be on. I included that set-up in the breakdown, as well as the procedural cave and crystals modeling process.
Separate FX elements for better visualization.