INVASION
This project was created for my Dynamic Effects 04 class at Gnomon, taught by Christian Olan-Geddes. The focus of this class was to create a destruction focused shot.
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My primary inspirations for this shot were the Dune and Star Wars series.
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Responsible for all aspects except crowd models and animations ( via mixamo), and audio. Music by Luis Humanoide 2 on YouTube.
The biggest challenges I faced with this project were data management and optimization. The destruction of the building consisted of several different materials, consisting of concrete, metal, glass and wood. After procedurally creating the building, I had to separate parts by material to cater to the different fracturing needs. Dealing with the metals was especially challenging since it required its own workflow for deforming after the rigid body sim.
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My instructor, Christian, showed some very interesting ways to control destruction, which helped me pre-determine activation for the building. This let me art direct exactly when and which part of the building would be activated for destruction. This was essential to prevent the building from collapsing too early or too late.
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I made several different classes of constraints by material type, connecting internal pieces and external pieces so I could separately control the strengths. In addition, I also manipulated the constraint strengths to maintain large chunks while also getting small debris in some areas.
The pyro FX posed their own challenges. I utilized the Axiom Solver to keep things speedy and ensure quick iteration. The debris smoke needed to interact with the collapsing building but unpacking the million destruction pieces and converting them to VDB for collision every frame just wasn't an option. It was too much processing in the little time I had, so I ended up taking just the points from the destruction sim and creating an influence velocity field from them. It isn't a perfect replacement for actual collisions but it gave me a good enough result for this project.
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With the debris smoke and explosions combined, I had close to 200 million voxels, which was pretty challenging to render.
By the time I reached rendering, the building consisted of approximately 1 million individual fractured pieces and around 20 million polygons, and simply SOP importing that into Solaris just choked Houdini and crashed it, so I had to learn the proper way of importing all of my destruction geometry and rendering it efficiently in Solaris with Karma. Christian was a great help with this since he is very familiar with Solaris and USD.