Alien Ship
3/15/2017
This project is mainly focusing on destruction. I've started off by blocking out the city and did quick playblasts to get the overall speed and length of the final video. During this stage my main concerns are the locations of missile hits and the path which the alien ship will fly through.
Using red spheres to indicate impact / explosions I can easily visualize the size of explosion and roughly animate its visibility to tell its duration as well.
Next I've blocked in more buildings to populate the scene. Designing the shot with different buildings with different heights as well as keeping the overall shot's composition in mind.
Placing the street lamp really helps as I've already have in mind of what the final shot would be like.
I'd like the final shot to be darkly lit with fog indicating the city being abandoned. Dark environment, allowing the explosions and the ship's head lights to stand out is a great idea to show off the effects in this scene. With that in mind I've placed street lamps along the street to show the depth of the shot and light up areas that are too dark and far behind.
After nailing down the animation of the ship and the rhythm of the explosions. I've started modelling the highres of the Alien ship
The concept of the alien ship is heavily influenced by the movie Battleship.
With some kit bashing and some modelling I was able to quickly finish modeling the ship.
With the blocked out camera and animation nailed down, I'm able to model based on the which direction of the ship is going to be visible the most. Mainly focusing on the front view, I've made sure that it looks best front and lower angle.
Next without wasting much time I've completed the modeling of the city street. Again with the locations of the blasts nailed down, I'm able easily art direct what's going to be destroyed.
I wanted to destroy not only concrete but also some wood and metal, so I've placed some wooden construction platforms and metal pipes at locations where the blasts are going to be.
Next, I've quickly fractured the areas of the first impact with PullDownIt. Keeping in mind of the scale of the scene, I've lowered my gravity to emphasize on the scale of the debris, preventing them to look miniature-like.
I also like to use motion blur to preview during test renders, it gives me the overall feel of the explosions and tells me if I have enough pieces of debris. Small debris might be lost with motion blur, therefore it might looks like that there's too many pieces in the viewport but not the render.
The missile blast destructions are done with FractureFX. I've made the glass to shatter and break a few frames before the rest of the building for a more realism touch. Also, having modeled some interior floors and walls have really helped giving an illusion that it is a solid structure. Not just a empty building with walls.
Without wasting any time, I've started the smoke and explosion simulations whenever I'm happy with the destruction result.
I've decided to use phoenix at first, generating smoke from particles emitted from broken pieces from FractureFX.
Due to some technical difficulties with the licensing I wasn't able to use it.
Then I moved on to trying using Maya fluids converting to VDB workflow. As I'm currently most comfortable in maya fluids I was able to get promising results.
Getting some fields for the engines of the ship to affect the smoke really bring another level of realism into the shot.
Converting to VDB has given me some issues therefore I switched over to houdini after some tests
Houdini gave me solid results and most importantly being able to sim the explosion and smoke and still can render them together with the V-Ray volume grid.
While working on the FX part, I'm also working on the lighting of the scene. I tried golden hour lightning and a night moonlight lightning and decided to go for the night one.
After finalizing the lightning and having all the caches for the smoke and explosions. I've started to set up render layers.
Having RGB lighting layers really helped bringing out the shapes of the smoke especially in this dark scene. Not to mention the Heat pass, it allows me to further shade my fire in comp. Giving additional bright areas and glows to the scene.
Moving into comp, the biggest issue I faced was the comp of both the Explosion layer and the smoke layer. Screening the explosion on top of the smoke shows the work I've done on the explosion but gives me an odd ghosting result.
Therefore I have to sacrifice the explosion for a more realistic look, which is placing the explosion behind the smoke.