Lee You Young ,student at the prestigious SF FILM SCHOOL  in Korea has published this stunning shot and breakdown claiming it is her first VFX showreel,  that’s pretty amazing given the complexity of the animation and quality of the final footage.

‘Pandemos’ is a project that expresses the situation in the covid-19 era that is sometimes described to be “like a movie” in the form of a SF video using VFX

Lee You explains the creature was modelled, rigged and animated in Maya,  then sent to UE5 for rendering the whole scene and final composition with real footage was finally done in Nuke.

Pulldownit plugin was used to shatter the bottle containing “Covid vaccine” when the creature  stepped on it releasing the virus fluid made using Maya Bifrost. Pulldownit simulation was exported in fbx format to UE5 to render the whole shot there.

Amazing job Lee You, thank you for sharing!

Andres de Mingo,  author of this realistic shot, kindly explains us how he did the dynamics effects using nCloth combined with Pulldownit plugin inside Maya.

This time I proposed myself to reproduce a believable crane accident all inside Maya, the final shot involves 3 different effects,  simulating  the crane cable in motion, the tearing of the ropes attaching the pipes and the final  falling and breaking of the pallet , all along with sound efects to increase realism.

Animating the Crane Cable

The motion of the crane cable is very simple, but I wanted the cable to show some tension and curvature when moving because of this I decided to use nCloth for animating it. In addition the hook has to follow the motion of the cable  but with its own independent swinging so I  created a nCloth shape for it as well, however the hook model was a little complex, including a support with nuts and bolts,  so I made a more simple shape to use it in simulation. Finally, the pallet and pipes has to follow also the animation of the cable and hook but again with its own relative motion, I included them in nCloth as a single simple shape wrapping the original objects.

In order to link the different parts together I created several Point to Surface nConstraints attaching the end vertexes of each object to the previous object in the chain. When computing, the crane transferred its motion to the nCloth cable and so on because of the links between them.

Tearing the Pallet Ropes

For tearing the ropes I made a simple trick, I removed some small polys of the original ropes model in the areas where I wanted them to tear and move away, then I made each separated part an independent node in Maya and create nCloth shapes for them. Finally I assigned  nConstraints joining the ends of each piece of rope to make them moving together, this time I used Component to Component constraints to select carefully the attaching vertexes. I also set the pallet proxy object and the containers nearby as passive colliders in Nucleus so they can collide with the falling ropes. At this point I had only to make the constraints attaching the ropes to disable at the frame I wanted, I got it just by animating this parameter of the nCloth shapes. Everything worked nicely except the ropes were trembling  too much when around the pallet, I increased its rigidity to remove the problem but this caused the ropes not bending after tearing and colliding with other objects so I had to animate also rigidity to reduce it a lot after separating the ropes in dynamics.

Simulating the Pipes

For simulating the pipes falling I used Pulldownit, contrary to nCloth this Maya plugin acquires automatically the velocity from animated objects without the need of any additional setup, besides the pallet breaks when colliding so PDI was perfect for the  task.

At this point I had cached all nCloth simulations with Alembic, my original idea was to make the pipes child’s of the Alembic cable so they will acquire its velocity before falling, sadly it didn’t work; the reason seems to be PDI only acquire velocity from keyframed objects but Alembic nodes are made of vertexes animated. I solved the issue by creating a duplicated version of the pipes and making they follow the cable motion using a wrap deform in Maya, then I had to keyframe the original pipes group to match the motion of the wrapped version,  I had to do this only for the last swing of the cable so it wasn’t difficult. Afterwards setting all pipes as PDI rigid bodies and making them activate at frame did the work.

I did the same trick for the pallet but this time creating a PDI fracture body and setting it to activate at the desired frame. Finally animating visibility for each version of the pallet, the wrapped and the simulated one, I got the complete smooth effect.

Render and sound effects

For rendering the scene I used Arnold in Maya with just an Skydome light, as being an outdoor scene Arnold was pretty fast and the render looks very realistic, I composed the final shot in Davinci Resolve and adding sound effects there,  I must say doing it was fun and easy,  Davinci  is a great software specially its latest version.

Conclusions

It has been an interesting experience working in this project, specially I learned how to combine different solvers , nCloth and PDI,   nCloth worked well, and the fact you can animate its parameters to get different cloth behaviour at different moments of the simulation helps a lot. PDI was  easy to use and you can get different outcomes by tweaking parameters almost instantly. It would be great a more direct connection between both solvers to need less steps when combining them in the same effect.

Andres de Mingo kindly explains us the making of some complex effects using Pulldownit and FumeFX in 3dMax for his appealing destruction shot.

This project was about destroying a brick wall with an animated robot, I had done similar things in the past using Pulldownit and not difficult but this time I needed to create a thin long crack in the stucco before making the wall to collapse and in addition this crack should follow the trajectory of an animated  laser beam coming from the hand of the robot, that was the main challenge.

Making the laser beam crack

The laser is a simple thin cylinder in 3ds Max with the height value animated to make it grow towards the wall, besides the cylinder has a Octane material  with emission per blue color, in this way it can illuminate the scene and finally to make it shine I added glare and bloom to the cylinder as a post process with Octane render itself.

To fracture the wall in the shape of a circle I created a circle spline in 3ds Max and put it inside the stucco, then I used the path-based shatter feature of Pulldownit to create the fragments, with around 200 shards, but I wanted the center part of the wall to break later so I added a second local shatter pattern in the middle of about 70 shards.

For making the crack following the trajectory of the light beam, I used a PDI cracker object attached to the circle path, then adding some keys to make sure the cracker had the same speed of the laser and by playing the simulation I got this appealing effect done in seconds.

Only problem was the center part of the stucco was falling to the ground after it became isolated, to solve it I attached the stucco wall to the bricks behind by selecting the option “Attach Nearest” of PDI Fracture Bodies.

Hitting the wall

The brick wall is made of small cubes attached together as a single object, I discovered this is important to get it broken in the shape of bricks in dynamics, otherwise the wall breaks as a continuous surface. I used a similar setup than the stucco, this time I created two concentric circle splines in both sides of the wall of same size, and shattered the wall in around 1200 shards with path-based pattern, then adding a local shatter pattern of around 600 shards in the middle, in this way PDI created small fragments in the contour of the circles perfect to crack them. Also to get the bricks as separated objects after shattering the wall I had to check the PDI shatter option “detect mesh-groups”.

After getting the fragments created I made a fracture body for the whole thing including the stucco part and set it as static in PDI fractures options, also setting Clusterize to 0 to force the wall breaking only along the circle shapes.

I didn’t use the robot itself for this part of the shot, in its place I created a flat cylinder of the same size of the circle and animate it to hit the wall, so it pushed only  the fragments in the middle and hiding this object from rendering made the trick.

I rendered everything with Octane, because it is very fast and easy to use, maybe you have more features with other renderers but they takes much longer to get the final images ready.

Adding dust

After the PDi simulation was baked I started adding dust with Fume FX, I generated a slight wake of dust following the laser beam by simply emitting smoke from the same cracker object I’ve used before, as this object was already attached to the circle path that was easy.

For adding smoke to the wall when collapsing, I used Particle Flow in 3ds max to attach particles to the stucco fragments but only along the borders, I set around 1500 particles for this, then I set those particles as source in Fume.

Dust is heavier than the air so it must fall eventually to the ground, I played with gravity and buoyancy values until getting the desired look for smoke.

For rendering dust, I used Arnold because FumeFx  doesn’t support Octane, however at first I wasnt able to render fume with Arnold neither,  finally I had to convert the smoke to openVDB format and use an aiVolume with aiStandardVolume shaders with it, after that everything was pretty automatic except I had to set some parts of the robot that were in front of the smoke as matte shadow objects to render it correctly.

Dust was rendered in a separate pass and composed later in Fusion in this way it gives you a second chance to modify color and brightness to improve the look of the smoke.

Conclusions

It was a nice experience working with Pulldownit plugin, in this shot there were different stages for destruction, first the stucco crack, then the hole in the middle and finally the robot passing through the wall, maybe the most surprising to me was PDI can make all of this effects using the same set in one run, without having to resort to more complex setup like preparing and hiding partially destroyed models and replace them at some moment. PDi was pretty reactive allowing me to get the results in seconds, modify parameters and compute again, that was great.

Adding dust to fragments with pFlow and Fume FX was also quite easy and fast computing.

Thank you Andres for sharing your experience in our blog!