In this project, I had the pleasure to contribute dust effects. This is something, I’d wanted to do since I watched breakdowns of loads of dust fx for ‘Prince of Persia’. So, I was really happy when Marijn asked me to work on this shot. As a refresher, I’ve included the final graded shot below:
View in full resolution: H264. (more…)
It’s time for another update on the explosion. It’s been silent for a while now, as I’ve been working on some other stuff while running simulations and renders in the background.
As a side note: I’m really pleased with the way HQueue is working on my little farm. It makes simulations and renders much easier to schedule and manage, so its was well worth a little investment in time to set it up. I’m thinking of writing a little post on my experiences with HQueue so far some day soon.
Anyway, on with the fragments and fluids. I’ll start with a render as usual:
View in high resolution: H264.
This is a render of the latest simulation that I have run on both the ‘faces’ and ‘energy fluid’, it also includes the ‘sparks’ particle sim. As with the previous renders, I ran the render passes through my very basic multi pass setup to tune it a little and add some glows. (more…)
Now the exhaust wall stuff is done and made into a tool, attention has shifted back to the explosion animation and simulation. By now all the major systems for animating and hand-over to simulation are in place.
Let me start by showing you a test animation for that I’ve rendered out. I did a very quick multi-pass comp on the render to attenuate reflections a bit and add some glows. The animation is rendered at 8 times slow motion.
View in high resolution: H264.
Here’s a short update on part 2 of ‘Derezzing’ a crashing light cycle. My background render of the falling apart of the full body of the cycle (in 4 fragments) has completed and here is the result:
View in high resolution: H264.
The render crashed around frame 69 for some reason, so I restarted it from that point on, but had forgotten that I had added a ‘RDB Autofreeze’ micro solver to my dynamics setup. This is why there is a little jump in the faces lying on the ground towards the end of the animation. The cycle doesn’t completely disintegrate as the animation I had setup for this wasn’t reaching the rear end of the cycle, which is why it doesn’t completely fall apart there.
Anyway, this was done by basically turning on all fragments, so I guess I shouldn’t complain about these details. I’m really pleased by the result so far. This animation definitely nicely shows what’s happening to the fragments as they fall apart.
In the mean time, I’m animating a first go at the final animation sequence for the crash, which is progressing nicely. The basic animation path for the crashing cycle is done now, next up is creating the proper fragments, based on how the cycle hits the wall and direct each fragment into its initial path before the dynamics sim will take over. This is a bit more work than just throw the cycle into a collision object and let dynamics do all of it, but it allows me to completely control what happens during the crash and where each piece flies off to with what initial velocity.
Ok, time to get back to fracturing and animating…
Cheers,
Erik
Here’s part 2 about my ‘derezzing’ cycle animation. I’ve now more or less finished the setup for ‘disintegrating’ individual fragments that will explode of the cycle when it crashes into the exhaust wall of its opponent.
After some basic cleaning up of my script, I thought, “let me do a multi fragment test and see what happens…”. This reminded me of how awesome the procedural nature of Houdini truly is! I added another fracture plane to my breaker and held my breath while I ran a simulation of the cycle without any animation, just sitting there in 4 fragments and let the Tron universe do its thing 
The following image is the result that I found when rendering frame 23 once I stopped the sim there…:
I was rather blown away by this, I must admit, even though that may sound really narcissistic (lets just call it lasting boyish love of all things shiny and glowy). The only thing I did to the render coming out of Mantra was throw it into the comp I had already prepaired for a rerender of my original test animation which follows below (which is nothing more than a slightly rebalanced throw-together of the render passes). Note that the blue glowing particle stuff coming from between the fragments is not yet the explosion of fluid as seen in the real Tron Legacy shots. This will be a separate fluid sim.
Anyway, as mentioned above, I rerendered the first test animation through the current setup. You can see it below:
View in high resolution: H264.
The next steps involve quite a bit of keyframe animation of the cycle hitting the wall and the initial movement of the fragments before they are handed over to a dynamic sim. While working on that, I’ll run a render of the full cycle disintegrating in the mean time on my ‘farm’ (as in the single frame above), I just want to see it moving 
.
Until the next post…
Cheers,
Erik
Together with a bunch of great guys, I recently worked on the music video of the official song of the AFC Asian Cup: ‘Yalla Asia’ (by Jay Sean featuring Karl Wolf).
The full vfx team (in no particular order) was:
Specifically, I contributed a dust simulation to the ‘dog morph’ shot at around 1:10. On this shot, Marijn Eken was the vfx super visor and did the final grade, Richard Levene created the car animation (animation and shading/render), Marco de Goeij did the camera matchmove and Linus Hoffman did compositing and rotomation of the dogs.
View in full resolution: H264.
In following posts, I’ll be discussing how I did the dust sim for this shot, and some of the other guys will talk about their part as guest-blogger. We managed to pull off this shot (and the rest of the clip) in a seriously short amount of time, burning too much of the good ol’ midnight oil than I care to think about. But it turned out quite nicely, so we’re happy to share how we created the shot!
Cheers,
Erik
Probably the coolest effect in Tron is the ‘derezzing’ of light cycles after they crash into an ‘exhaust wall’. This effect didn’t end up being part of our Tron test animation. So I figured, I’d give it a go and create one anyway
Anyway, I did a first test setup of a single fragment that’s exploded of a crashed cycle. To figure out what happens during the violent ‘derezzing’ I closely looked at the original VFX test. A few days ago I also found links to Digital Domain’s making off video, which has in the mean time been removed again. However, I did have a close enough look at it to get some idea’s on what to do with my version of this effect. Unfortunately, Tron Legacy hasn’t been released to cinema’s in my little nook of the world (have to wait until Jan 19), so I haven’t had the chance to get better look at all the examples in the movie itself.
While I planned my next post to be a movie of setting up a wave from scratch using my wave tools, I will post this fluid test first. As was to be expected a interesting potential job comes along that requires some quick R&D, so I had to do this first. That said, I’m quite far in my setup for recording the wave tool movie so that’s definitely coming up soon…
In this test I’m filling a box with water using a particle fluid sim. It has 5 emitters at different positions and angles. For this kind of effect I think particle fluids look better than volume fluids as you get nice splashes. However, there is a distinct advantage for using volumes as the velocity fields in a volume sim can be very nicely used to advect additional particles, for example to add bubbles to the water.