Yanbin's VFX blog

For the Final Major Project, I have furthered my knowledge of Houdini, Maya and Nuke, and learnt to use Redshift, a brand new renderer, to great effect.

For my project, I studied a lot about Taoist culture, such as the Bagua, the Heavenly Stems, the Earthly Branches, etc. Tao’s story is based on a battle between Shifang, a young Taoist priest, and a sorcerer, who is a representative of the Taoist family, and a sorcerer, who represents the forces of darkness. This requires Maya for modelling and scene building. After referencing a lot of relevant content from film and games, the two characters were finalised for production.

For the most prominent visual effects shots, I further learnt how to optimise particle related items and learnt to use Redshift for rendering. Most of these visual effects shots were inspired by the Taoist word “Bagua”. This required deeper research into the different Taoist tools that contain the Bagua to avoid cultural errors. At the same time, it is important to use imagery that brings out the Taoist culture, such as ink effects.3D ink is also a topic I have been working on since 2019, and I have also worked on 3D ink in my previous studies. This time I have optimised the overall effect even further through my studies and this improvement is visible to the naked eye.

But excluding the special effects part, I found that for the production of animation in Maya is still insufficient. The processing of some frames is not smooth enough, and at the same time, the control of the camera language still needs to be improved. Although I tried my best to learn and adjust the content, the effect is still not very satisfactory. This requires me to further study the related knowledge and content in the future.

After the completion of all the contents, I carried out the work of soundtrack, dubbing, colour grading and editing, and finally showed the film in front of you. But this is a new starting point for me. Through this short film, I have learnt more relevant knowledge and also realised my shortcomings. Learning during the production process will become a regular part of my career in the future, and I will keep learning.

The renderers used in this short film are Arnold and Redshift. all the layers of the first shot were rendered using Redshift. I chose Arnold for scenes with a small amount of simulation, such as the scene with just animation and characters.

For larger environments such as the first shot, which has a large amount of particle processing, I chose to use Redshift for GPU rendering, and IPR Renderview to monitor the rendering of the layer in real time.

There are many Bagua-related elements in my FMP. There are some differences in how they are made, but they all come from the same model. The creation of this model first requires the introduction of an image as an external reference. Then just model from it. The difference lies in the Houdini deformations, different lighting effects or particle effects depending on the desired effect. For this shot, for example, you only need to animate the rotation of the centre part of the model and import it as an Alembic into Houdini as an emitter to create particle effects.

The making of the magic hand is divided into three parts. In the first part we use Maya’s rigging.

The making of the magic hand is divided into three parts. In the first part we use Maya’s rigging. For the second part the smoke was created with reference to the clouds in the first shot, using the centre of the wrist as the centre of the smoke rotation and placed in a suitable position to the model. The third part is the depression on the surface of the hand. Here the scatter node scatters points on the surface of the hand and makes groups of lines through which the depressions are realised. And again scatter randomly on the lines, adjust the material to glow with Redshift to create the effect of glowing in the cracks.

Bagua mirrors are used as emitters and particles are attached to their surfaces.

Bagua mirrors are used as emitters and particles are attached to their surfaces. The entire asset was created using a large number of particles, which was not difficult to create, and in the same way as the shockwave in the first shot, it needed to be given a velocity that spreads outwards and ensure that the particles can be emitted in that direction. But as in the image, a lot of caching is required.

The first part is a particle effect of a magical portal that will take up quite a major part of the shot in FMP. The second character, the wizard, will appear through this portal in a pre-defined altar scene. The portal was created using a lot of Cd to make the portal colourful, and separate particle layers and smoke layers to facilitate modifications to each part.

After completing each layer in Houdini, compositing and colour grading needs to be done in Nuke. The first thing to do is is to read each layer and then use the Postage node to pass in the data for the next step. For the compositing in Nuke, I used a lot of Roto and Blur nodes to deal with the blurring details around the edges. I also use a lot of Grade nodes to control the colour channel, gane and gamma of each layer.

Take the clouds, for example.

At the same time, we need to do some code usage, such as giving value a declaration and using it to perform some multiplication operations to achieve the desired effect.

In each section we need to adjust the colour channels, gane and gamma via the Grade node to ensure that the required colours are correct and to get a relatively good composite result.