Sandstorm FX Breakdown | Houdini & Arnold
In-Depth Breakdown - https://www.arctiem.com/fathertime
Father Time is a demo reel piece I have been working on for the past few months.
Everything was rendered in Houdini and Arnold.
Backplate from Kelly - https://www.pexels.com/@kelly-1179532/
Created as part of Demo Reel at Gnomon School of Visual Effects
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email: rahul18gpt@gmail.com
Website:https://www.arctiem.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahul-gupta-595073179/
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"Scott Buckley - Age of Wonder" is under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
/ musicbyscottb
Music powered by BreakingCopyright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wREEWCqS5d4&t=0s
Father Time
The idea was to create a sandstorm scene of an epic scale and to convey a story of the impeding doom.
A more technically challenging project I've done in recent memory. This of course, is partly due to the immense amount of rendering.
Process
Taking references from real life, news clipping, and weather reports and looking at movies that do Sandstorm well was part of the research process when I started blocking out my scene in Houdini.
Following the gathering of references, I started by tracking my footage inside of 3DEqualizer. After the track was complete, I brought the FBX scene inside of Houdini and started blocking out the sand clouds.
Coming up with the shape of base geometry of the Sand Cloud to start emitting pyro smoke from, was challenging. I went through numerous changes of shapes and sizes of the bent cloud geometry.
At the starting stage, I was constantly wedging attributes to get the look I wanted from the rolling clouds. While doing this, I used to quickly matte paint inside of nuke by duplicating one rendered cloud and laying it out.
To get a break up in the shapes of the sand clouds, I had to collide the pyro simulation with 3-4 cylinders at the start of the simulation. I also played with the timescale; I slowed down the simulation in the pyro solver after a certain point.
The velocities for the sand cloud were based on being higher at the bottom than at the top; the velocities were also given a 0 value in the opposite direction, so the cloud would not start blowing backward.
The rendering was straightforward. The cloudscape had to be rendered in different layers, with different layers matted out with other layers. Mostly, each cloud had different materials with slight variances in densities and scattering attributes.
