“Emergence”
This shot is a result of a dive into destruction! I’ve always been inspired by gothic architecture, and wanted to create a shot where instead of catastrophic destruction, the breaking symbolizes a positive event where light now streams through and warms the cold stone floors. Created in Houdini and rendered in Karma, my favorite aspects of this shot were creating custom procedural cracking on the windows, and art directing the wooden beam breaking.
Responsible for: All aspects.
Software: Houdini, Karma, Nuke, and DaVinci Resolve.
RBDs: I wanted to practice destruction on a wide range of materials, and this stained-glass window was the perfect combination of stone, glass, wood, metal, and sand! I started by researching how gothic architecture was constructed, learning that the walls were made from large, often limestone blocks that were filled with a rubble core which was a mixture of stone, mortar, gravel, and debris. I also learned how stained glass is composed, and because of the fact stained glass is composed of glass pieces held together by lead, it tends to break in pieces along score lines, vs regular glass which shatters.
Metal deformation here was very fun. I started using soft constraints, then switched them to hard for any force lower than a set threshold (which was the amount on the initial impact only), then I point deformed the entire frame using this as a guide.
Debris: Having learned about the rubble core which often filled the center of limestone blocks, I added a layer of debris pouring out of the blocks as they were destroyed
Dust: The story of this shot relies on a dark, dusty interior which light then shines into, to I added two layers of dust: one triggered by the initial window destruction,
The other layer was an atmosphe of dust and particulate which are then disturbed by the velocities of the breaking geometry.
Wood: Finally, I wanted a large beam to fall into frame as a secondary element after the initial window break. I setup custom wood-grain fractures and weakened the constraints only along the top edge, so that when the beam fell onto the stone, it would split, but stay mostly together the way that wood does in the real world.