Queen Pearl Breakdown

FX Artist / CG-Generalist

QUEEN

PEARL

Queen Pearl is my Gnomon demo reel project. My Goal for this project was to explore different systems inside Houdini & procedural tools to create variety of effects. While I was using the robust tools for the simulations, I also created several HDAs - Lightning, Bridge, Rock Generators, Low vs High Res switch, to make the repeatable and tedious process more fun. I achieved art directable tools by streamlining the process right from the beginning with scalability in mind. I used VEX to overcome certain hiccups, finally packaging the systems into HDAs to power the project.

The concept of the project is to have "Queen Pearl" arrive from nebula to throne mountains. The sky has a portal through which the beam enters the earth, which acts as a bridge for her to travel between worlds.

Building the Environment

Houdini`s proceduralism empowers asset building by making the process more enjoyable and fun, it makes the asset scalable and adaptable. I was able to create several assets using the basic principle of starting simple and layering in features as needed.

I started off with two points, creating a line between them, sweeping to create the bridge base. And using fracturing tools to create the ground surface of the bridge, then modifying the point attributes to randomize the position and rotation of the stones.

Resampling the same line to get desired number of firepits, and also using the location of those resampled points to copy our fire simulations later to keep the whole system procedural. The stairs from bridge to the throne undergoes the same process.

Packaging this system into stone bridge generator that will take in a curve as input will produce ancient style bridges with firepits that is completely art directable with control over number of firepits, curved/elevated bridge, stone density and so on.

Rocks

Using VDB, I was able to procedurally create complex rocks.
With the rock generator in place, it was just the wedging process to create multiple versions of it and then copying to desired position.

once the rocks are in place and the environment is completely manifested, I rendered out a proxy version to minimize the load time during rendering.

Portal

pyro driving the majority of effects in this shot. several smoke simulation layers are placed on top of each other producing complex effect on the portal opening, complimenting the particle simulation which is the selling point of this shot. The particle simulation is driven by smoke simulation advection.

Finally another smoke simulation and a flying debris particle simulation to emphasize the force of the beam and to add that atmospherics to blend all the effects together.

Clouds

Scattered random shapes onto a spiral curve, converted it to VDB, modified the shape using volume VOP and cloud noises. And Finally VEX to animate a opening in the middle of the cloud to reveal the throne mountains. Particle simulation fed into my lightning HDA to create lightning inside of the clouds.

Lightning

Lightning HDA that will control the growth, branches, noises, width, output as geo or strands. I really love the recursive processing feature found in RBD material fracture node, so I used multiparm in this HDA which will add recursive noises to the lightning strands, each layer of the noise can be used to art direct the lightning shape. Primary big shapes, secondary mid shapes and tertiary high frequency details. Each layer can be animated to reflect the growing energy of a lightning. A growth attribute that will drive the different AOVs - fade out, burst, tips, etc. for the lightning which can be used in compositing to get the desired effect.

Fire

Attribute that will act as the emission mask for logs, noised it up and animated the mask to vary the fire emission overtime. Once the fire simulation in its desired state, wedged the emission mask and the micro solvers to get different variations.

Beam

Points Scattered onto displaced geometry created out of a curve and little bit of VEX to make the points stick and travel along the geometry. Point velocities are calculated and modified using noises. Points and velocities are rasterized to volume and fed to pyro solver.

Lighting, Rendering & Compositing

Redshift was used to render the project. Renders were separated into as many layers as possible to have complete control over in compositing. Cache were optimized to save disk space and wherever possible Proxy objects were created to reduce the load time during rendering, Composited in Nuke.