Advanced Portfolio VFX

Advanced Portfolio VFX Demo Reel

1:  Ocean

I had always wanted to create something realistic but virtual. So i went in to Autodesk Maya searching for simulations. I have heard from many that its a good environment to simulate different effects. I started to play around with some of the simulations and then the idea of an ocean struck me which could be exciting as well as simple and yet realistic. But i wanted to create an effect of being there in the ocean as if there is a man in a boat in a rough ocean. 

But then i did some research and came up with some knowledge of the Buoyancy feature which has been built in to the ocean shader which turned out to be exactly what i want.A camera was placed on top of a pillar and i placed it over the top of the ocean . Then everything was about tweaking of the buoyancy parameter of the ocean shader. After rendering out my solution i went in to Adobe After Effects and tweaked the colors a bit and rendered out the color corrected final shot.My solution to the problem can be seen in the screen shot below

2: Concrete Fall

The concept was to simulate a concrete block falling down from top and crashing on to the ground and breaking in to many pieces.The challenge was to simulate the exact nature of the crash as in real world. This called for a detour from what i usually have opted to do.Since this piece required me to fracture a geometry and also had to simulate a geometry breakup while it makes its impact on the ground. There are many impact systems available in the market which are compatible with many 3D packages that are commonly used now a days. I went for Rayfire for its simplicity and correctness of the simulation.

The clock of concrete was modeled in 3ds Max and then was given as a dynamic impact object in to Rayfire system. Then using a ground plane as the static object and impact surface i simulated a crash with interactive demolition turned on which makes the concrete block crash  on the ground plane and break itself at the point of impact and then followed by subsequent breaking up in to many irregular pieces which is what exactly happens in real world too.

The texture i used for concrete modelling is given below

The depth map was created from it using nVidia photoshop depth map plugin

The scene was later rendered out along with the z depth pass which helped me to depth composite the whole scene by controlling the exposure values inside Adobe After Effects.I used some of the Dust and smoke stock footage which i obtained from videocopilot.net for added realism.

3: Daemon Ball

This piece was one of the most enjoyable pieces of work that i have ever done. Inspired from one of the tutorials that i have followed and with the combination of my own idea i derived this one. Although this took quite an effort to put together, it was worth the time spent because of the shear pleasure that it gives to watch it happen over and over in front of my eyes.

I had several questions in my mind when i started out on this one.Some of these were:

1: How to emit millions of particles from inside of the ball after its initial fracturing?

2:How to slower down the speed to create the ultra low motion effect so that it appears that each and every particle is just hanging there in the air instead of just quickly vanishing out of the camera.?

The preliminary part of the design was almost straight forward. I modeled the ball and textured it in Autodesk 3ds Max and as in the example above i added it in to Rayfire system as a dynamic impact object and used a plane as a ground to cause the impact which caused interactive demolition.That got me about halfway stage. Then comes my first question. How to emit particles from the preliminary particles.I tried interactive demolition on the already fractured preliminary particles with Rayfire and the system could not handle it and crashed. Later i found out a perfect solution by introducing a particle flow object and linking it to the preliminary particles. I used deflectors to animate the particles as if they are bouncing up from the preliminary particles.

The screenshot below shows the preliminary particles emerging out of the ball due to Rayfire fracturing

The screenshot below shows the particle emitting due to PF source emissions.

Then came the question of ultra slow motion. If i started to slow it down by using time warp or any other time remapping mechanisms in After Effects it would create an unrealistic effect. I wanted to crate the effect from the render itself. So the solution i came up with was to bump up the frame rate to a crazy amount n such as 400 fps. After that i rendered out the region of interest only from the 3000 odd frames which i ended up after i bumped up the fps.But the result was stunning. I also rendered out the Z depth pass to composite in After Effects for faking the depth of focus effect where individual particles made to focus as they come out of the whole scene.

4: Ground Crack

I decided to try out and do one piece in which i create this ground cracking scene where cracks appear on the ground because of some distress wave passing through the underground.My first  choice of fracturing geometry went to Rayfire but then i could end up using 3ds Max for rendering. But i wanted to do this using another one of my favorite packages, Maxon Cinema 4D. Then it raised the question of fracturing geometry. but the answer to that question came as a sweet little python plugin named Thrausi. It allows users to break up any given geometry in to different pieces according to specifications given at the time of fracturing the geometry. It lacked all the impact specific features of Rayfire system which is quite expensive too. But this little plugin Thrausi for cinema 4D is freeware. That's what attracted me towards it.

The screenshot below shows the fracturing that i did in Thrausi

Later i went on to create the cracking of ground by using one of  Cinema 4D's famous mo graph effectors namely Random. The renders were made after that and were composited along with some dust and smoke elements from videocopilot.net for added realism in Adobe After Effects and to be honest i am as satisfied with Thrausi and Cinema 4D as  Rayfire . Only thing is that in Cinema 4D, i had to play around with effector parameters for a while to get the required effect i wanted while in Rayfire everything will be calculated when we do the simulation.

5: Breaking Glass

I made this piece using 3ds Max and Cebas Thinking Particles plugin . This took so much less time in rendering out . I wanted to see the working procedure of this plugin which was used in the building up of some of the most amazing movies such as 2012.The plugin as such has a rather weird interface which by the way allows for modifying every single piece of the fragmentation and collision event that we are simulating.

The screenshot shows the fragmentation that i set up.

I set up a master system which consisted of glass particles, bullet particles and fragments which gets generated.In the fragment section, i set up various forces which interact with the fragments and how they should behave so on and so forth. The result to the whole experiment was satisfying as it did give me an exact simulation of breaking of glass being hit by a bullet. the only down side is that i had to spend a log time learning about setting up the system.

6:Freeze Frame

I had to do something to satisfy my nostalgic curiosity to implement the famous freeze frame effect. Well the reason to that was related to the insanely huge amount of time that i had to spend perfecting the mask and matching the footages. But i decided to give it a shot to see whether or not i can sit in front of my system and can actually go over something like this frame by frame.But everything turned out pretty well as i had to make masks all over the place for creating this effect.I did the entire effect in Adobe After Effects CS6

7: Energy Particles

This idea came in to my mind suddenly while i was browsing through my pictures collection and came up on on one the photos i took of Beckett park when i came first to Leeds Met campus. I researched a bit about the particle systems in Adobe After Effects and made up my mind not to go on to anywhere else for making this whole piece up. I used cc particle world effect predominantly in this piece. I made up the inward particles and the glowing core from cc particle world tweaked according to my preferences and used another cc particle world for creating the small bubbles. Then i went on to create another cc particle world and used Lens convex option inside particle parameters to use a map of my preference to act as a reference to crate a smoke like atmosphere.The smoke map that i used can be seen below.

Then i went on to add some lights below by using masks and added some bits flying around my using another cc particel world effect. At last i color corrected ti and rendered out the full finished shot.