And so it begins! This WIP will serve to breakdown the pre-production process as well as the start of the animation work on part 2 and what I have planned going forward.
Pre-Production on Part 2
Below is the shot list that I've written out for the entirety of part 2. I'm going to stick to this as much as possible. I hope you all like what I've got planned! If you'd like the full shot list, I've attached a PDF .
Additionally, Bread has prepared another set of boards for part 2. These have been prepped for some time now, but I haven't had the chance to share them just yet. These are rough ideas of what each shot will look like. Please keep in mind that the first 3 boards do not reflect the shot list as they were changed last minute.
Additionally, I'm working on redoing the compositing and grading for part 1. I'm not very happy with how it looks and I'm changing my compositing software. To make sure the two parts are visually consistent, I'll be redoing part 1's compositing and grading in Blender.
Shot 1A Rendered Preview
I've already been hard at work getting shot 1 complete in its entirety! This shot will be displayed on a TV inside of a house or apartment as stated on the shot list for 1B. You can download the full resolution shot in the files attached below.
Environment Building
This is probably one of the most challenging environments I've made to date. It required a lot of balancing between optimized background buildings and highly detailed buildings in the foreground.
Using high poly buildings for the foreground is essential in a shot like this as the camera is flying pretty close to the structures. The good news is that I can leave out details that the camera won't see, like the ground.
Placing higher detailed buildings in the mid-ground also helps draw the eye away from the areas of lower detail, as shown below. In addition, this shot will be shown on a TV instead of being full-screen.
Simulating Large Scale Destruction - Mesh Sim
This is an interesting challenge! Unlike large studios, I don't have access to simulation farms where I can send off a sim and let it cook for a few hours while I do other things. This means I have to get creative with how I do my destruction on a larger scale.
The solution? Cloth simulation. Yes, really! When working at a distance, it's hard to see imperfections in the geometry/destruction at render time. This means that using simplified collision and interaction methods can be an easy out for a complicated task. Each highlighted object below is a building that Legacy's paws will interact with. Thus, I've separated each building into its own unique mesh for simulation.
After applying a cloth simulation modifier to each separated mesh, I adjust two settings: the timing and the pin group, highlighted below. The pin group ensures that the base of the building stays in the place so that it doesn't just fall when Legacy's paw comes down. Adjusting the start and end frame is also crucial as it tells Blender when to begin the simulation as Legacy's paw comes into contact.
Simulating Large Scale Destruction - Smoke Sim
After I've baked out the mesh simulation from Blender, I can export that to an alembic and move into Houdini where I work through the smoke sim.
Doing the smoke simulation for the building destruction required a little bit of ingenuity as I didn't have access to debris sourcing tools that come with Houdini's RBD or MPM solvers. Below is the node setup that I used for sourcing on the buildings.
My solution for sourcing was to use the velocity of each scattered point as a threshold for the sourcing density. The first step was to convert each building into a point cloud with the inherited velocities from the geometry. Each yellow line below represents a velocity vector for a point.
Then came the fun part. By using a little bit of VEX (Houdini's C-based scripting language), I could set the smoke sourcing regions by setting the density to 0 where a point's velocity was less than a given value.
The code for the setup is below. @P.y represents the points position. Essentially, if a point below the ground, it won't emit smoke.
To create the giant smoke explosions from Legacy's heels impacting the ground, I used a method that I had developed from the last animation, R&R.
This uses the "pyro_burst_source" node to create a high velocity puff of smoke that emits from just where Legacy's paw meets the ground.
Sourcing this is very similar to what I'm doing for the buildings. Simply put, I use the points that the burst source exports as rasterized attributes for the dust explosion. The biggest things here is multiplying the velocity by 5 so the explosion is more aggressive.