“Still Life”
This project marks a lot of firsts! My first large-scale Houdini effects shot, first time creating HDAs, first time using USD, and first time creating something based on a personal story. Based on the dichotomy of grieving a loss, while knowing that grief comes from unconditional love, this project was inspired by a Daniel Conway painting, where a beautiful tree clings to the cliff while surrounded by lava and ash. This project led me to build HDAs to create art directable assets, dive into USD to create a pipeline to manage a large scene, and learn how to use FLIP, Pyro, POPs, Heightfields, and SOP Solvers to create the effects needed to tell an emotional story.
Responsible for: All aspects. Based on 2 paintings by Daniel Conway.
Software: Houdini, RenderMan, Karma, Nuke, and DaVinci Resolve.
Effects
Lava: The most prominent effect in the scene was lava, dripping menacingly and slowly down the cliffside. The biggest lesson I learned here was the importance of timing to convey both scale and mood. Fast, chaotic lava felt smaller and more aggravated than what the shot needed. I worked with the viscosity, timing, and temperature diffusion of the lava to get a slower, more dramatic motion that conveyed both the size and the controlled, almost elegant motion needed for the story.
Floor is lava too! The ground plane in the distance below everything also needed to feel molten and menacing. Due to my 10-week timeline, I couldn’t afford hours creating and simulating a large FLIP simulation that would be so far in the background, so I instead created custom heightfields and used custom masking and distortion to animate channels of lava pushing through the cooled chunks of ash. Ended up taking 20 minutes to setup and dial in, and saved me hours of caching!
Smoke and steam: All that heat called for some rolling smoke pouring down over the cliffs. Here I setup custom velocity fields based curves I could position across the cliff faces to pull the smoke toward and down the cliffsides. I also spent some time generating multiple clouds and giving them some turbulence. These didn’t end up in the final version but were fun to create and used in other projects!
Honorable mention: My initial concept did include a volcano, and I spent considerable RnD time on creating a volcano that exploded, lava breaking off chunks as it pours over the edges. I ended up removing this element, as it was pulling focus from the main storytelling I was looking for from the tree.
Environment Tools
With a large environment to tackle, I decided to build multiple HDAs to be able to procedurally create and art direct assets such as cliffs, thin trees, and even the hero tree. This helped me get everything together environment wise very quickly and allowed for easy artistic changes as needed!
For the cliffs, I used attributes to control the shape, height, and silhouette of the model, and layered different sizes of noise over the re-meshed geometry to articulate detail that could be dialed based on the distance to camera.
For the hero tree, I wanted to create that twisted, fantasy like spiral on the trunk, and ended up running a velocity along the curve, trailing it, and meshing that to create a customizable swirly look!
An important story point I needed to capture was how the tree was clinging on to the edge of the cliff. To accomplish a natural feeling root growth, I ran a particle sim with custom wind forces to grow on and into the cliff’s edge.
I took a little dive into USD for this project, since my scene was large and got heavy very fast! My pipeline wasn’t perfect, but it allowed me to manage data and update assets much quicker and easier than I normally would have! I learned a lot about data management from this too, and it allowed me to transition into studio pipelines much smoother since many studios now use Solaris and USD pipelines!