David Roubah, lead FX at Mikros Image explains some details about the use of Pulldownit in “Monolith” clip.
We had a few destruction shots to complete on the commercial. Two of them
in which we needed to create a fracture were entirely done using the
Pulldownit plugin for maya.
The first one is when a woman is dancing tango with her partner and breaks
the monolith all the way long which makes the first line of the car appear.
The second one is when the biker falls on the roof and shapes a little bit
more the stone into a car.
These two shots were extremely challenging for a couple of reasons:
They are directly preceeded and followed by shots including live blasts
effects which mean that we had to make our fracture match to those of the
real shots.
Beside this constraint of realism, we also needed to exactly control the
propagation of the destruction in terms of shape and speed as well as the
starting and final shapes of the monolith that is finally giving life to
the car through each step of fracture and has a primary role in the
narration.
These particular demands led us to use pulldownit as well as for example
the need to control size and shape of each fragment, and even remap their
inside faces…
At Mikros image, we have a particular approch and we consider the effect in
his globality : from the modeling to the compositing through rendering. We
decided to make this fractured pieces a base for the particles and fluid
simulation, that have been rendered and mixed together with Arnold renderer.
Every element of the effect have been imagined in terms of interaction: What
is influencing what, in the dynamics, but also in the lighting.
And again, it was a pleasure to have a precise and powerfull tool fully
integrated in maya!
KineticThoughts 