Magical Rock Assembly - Houdini & Nuke VFX Course

Fracture

We are going to start this course by fracturing our Hand geometry using voronoi and boolean techniques.

Procedural SOP Setup

After we create our fractured pieces, we are going to set up the assembly animation entirely at the SOP level.

The motion of the pieces will be determined by curves that we can art direct and change in real time, without having to resimulate anything.

So we are going to create this assembly animation without the use of any solvers.

Custom Particle Movement

After we set up the geometry assembly, the other layers will be created in more of the traditional way, with the help of solvers.

For the particle streams, we're going to base the movement on the curves that we created for our assembly.

Here we will use an advanced setup in VOPs to have complete control over the motion.

Smoke & Particle Advection

We are also going to use our fracture setup to create the smoke, and then use the smoke to advect particles, which will become the embers.

HeightField & Asset Scattering

Aside from all of the effects, we are going to use Heightfields to create some simple mountains in the back.

Then we will use megascans to add more rocks and variety to our scene, to make it feel more realistic.

Lighting, Rendering & AOVs

In the rendering sections we will set up all of the lights and materials, and render everything using Redshift.

Here we will also discuss best practices and how to set up different light passes and AOVs.

Compositing

In nuke we will bring all of our renders and start putting everything together.

We will separate the AOVs for each layer so we can have complete control over the final output.

Relighting

We will use the Bump Normals and World Position AOVs to relight our shot and extra rim detail on the subject.

Fog Particles

We're also going to use Nuke's particle system to create an additional fog layer to create a more interesting look.

Project Files.

The download archive also include the completed Houdini project file (ver. 19.5) and Nuke project file (ver. 14.0v3) - Please note that project files are created with Houdini Indie and Nuke Indie

I hope you will enjoy this course!