“Astral Ascension”
I’ve always been captivated by the magical look of acrylic and gauche paintings, so for this shot I wanted to create that in 3D. The horse run cycle was animated in Maya, and the rest was created in Houdini and rendered with Karma. I learned working with bold color blocks, and strong shapes worked best for the painted look I was after. This project was the first time I designed something with no real-world effect to reference, and it was both challenging and fun and taught me new ways of approaching how I create effects!
Responsible for: All aspects. Based on a painting by Anato Finnstark
Software: Houdini, Maya (Animation cycle), Karma, Nuke, and DaVinci Resolve.
Layering! This was my first time designing an effect without any available real world reference. I learned to trust the process even when feeling doubt during the development process!
Layering turned out the be the key to creating a painted, ethereal look. Starting with a base of vellum to create a brush-stroke trailing, I built an HDA with the help of my classmate that could generate a strip of cloth wrapped around the horse from points that could be placed on the mesh. This was then run through an initial simulation in object space the push it against the horse to set an initial state. Brought back to world space, the secondary simulation was run, with custom weight attributes mapping along the length of cloth in order to accentuate the overlap and follow-through motion as it trailed behind the horse. To accentuate the motion more, I added a velocity field along the path the horse takes across the sky to push up when the curve is negative, and down when the curve is positive. From here, I ran a pyro simulation with custom velocity fields from the cloth, horse’s hair and hooves, and an overall simulation across the entire spirit to tie everything together. Finally, I wanted the spirits to be adding to the environment, so upon contact with their respective sky paths, sourced snow particles to fall from their hooves. In order to get the snow to feel like it was pulled along with the energy of the horse, I created a velocity field to push it along the curve with a bias toward the horse’s velocity.
Warping reality: In order to convey the energy of these spirit horses, I wanted their motion to warp the sky, as if they were running through space and time like jell-o. This was fun to figure out, and I landed on creating a fog box in the sky, then simulating that with the horses velocities and geometry colliding. I then extracted the pyro based on disturbance and distance around the horse, and use RBG values on the rendered sky fog pass to bring into nuke and calculate those RGB values as normals to distort the sky. This was a fun new method I’d never done before, and created a pretty fun result!
Stylization: In order to get that final, brush-stroke finish and breakup, I tested different in render methods, but ended up deciding on a solution in nuke layering multiple Kuwahara filters together of varying detail sizes to be able to rapidly iterate and playback the result without having to wait on long renders. Each element had around 3 layers that ran across the geometry, and 2 over the edges which were dialed up much more to really break up the silhouettes. Additionally, based on distance to camera, the brush stroke size was increased to mimic the feeling of depth in a painting through detail loss. Overall this project was a super fun dive into lots of new methods and I’m happy with the final result. Moving forward I’d love to do another project with a similar look, and try some of the other methods I didn’t end up using for this piece such as using sprites to create the brush-strokes!