diploma Mother Nature's Power

[m-egger]

Hello!

I thought I'd create a thread to document some setups on our diploma project here. We're studying Animation at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and we'll graduate March/April 21 and are working on a concept for a social spot promoting green energy with serious VFX. We're currently 15 artists on it, but a lot of them are only on it beside their job, so it's way less actual manpower, but over the long production time we're still looking at some good potential. And with a bid of 500 man days, we've got our hands full.

Here's the initial concepts for our three key scenes:

1) An oil rig being crashed by an iceberg, 2) a coal power plant collapsing into a sinkhole, and 3) a giant volcano erupting and transforming the landscape into one of natural sources of energy.

 

We've built a few pipeline tools to make our work easier, here is a couple of the one's I'm really happy with:

This one features a lot of python and optimizations for really cool features like progression tracking as comment. ^{(It is a bit crashy sometimes due to Houdini+Windows issues and support couldn't help me, hopefully it gets fixed someday.)}

 

 All credits to my colleague Lucas Bruchhage and Dominik Lingenover (DMNK) for setting this lifesaver up.

 

Once we are done I am very happy to share the tools.

Cheers,
Martin

Edited June 18, 2020 by tortoise

[m-egger]

This is a universal fracture-solution that I built to give me interesting results in a more light-weight way than the material fracture.

It essentially gives really natural chipping and piece detail. I developed it for the coal plant falling.

Unfortunately, it sometimes lead to pieces having zero volume, causing major issues in Bullet sims, but a simple analysis and fix solves that too.

@Noobini, this was the culprit.  

And this is the origins and the core, a looped voronoi with variable densities and iteration count.

It yields really good results for structural geometry like buildings.

 

And also a subfracture tool that I built which analyzes the pieces and fractures the ones above the average (+-percentage). Red is the selection, white are pieces eligible from size, but randomly deselected and dark grey is the pieces that are too small.

 

Edited July 4, 2020 by tortoise

[m-egger]

Another Tool that I build some time ago was a particle to debris tool. Just something to save myself from doing for the one-thousandth time.

 

It automatically creates debris pieces from a simple box shatter and instances those particles onto incoming particles. It detects whether pscale/id is present and does all the stuff you would normally do for each debris sim.

It also normalizes the volume for the debris particles (with some fancy math) so the distribution of scale can be handled cleanly through the pscale on the particles.

Edited July 8, 2020 by tortoise

[scaduxx]

could you share this tool? it looks awesome.
or at least how to pick a random debris for each particle instance

Thanks

[m-egger]

After being recruited, you received it through DM anyway...

but for anyone else interested, here it is:

 

https://gum.co/FKghv
(Again, it's just an .HDANC, but it's easy enough to rebuild for commercial)

 

Also, here is another tool I built for redshift to break up repetetive textures:
https://gum.co/sDNppQ

 

[cudarsjanis]

On 7/4/2020 at 8:15 AM, m-egger said:

This is a universal fracture-solution that I built to give me interesting results in a more light-weight way than the material fracture.

It essentially gives really natural chipping and piece detail. I developed it for the coal plant falling.

Unfortunately, it sometimes lead to pieces having zero volume, causing major issues in Bullet sims, but a simple analysis and fix solves that too.

@Noobini, this was the culprit.  

And this is the origins and the core, a looped voronoi with variable densities and iteration count.

It yields really good results for structural geometry like buildings.

 

And also a subfracture tool that I built which analyzes the pieces and fractures the ones above the average (+-percentage). Red is the selection, white are pieces eligible from size, but randomly deselected and dark grey is the pieces that are too small.

 

That looks good. any chance this goes on gumroad at some point?