Eternal Fire | Breakdown
The inspiration for this piece was from one of my favorite childhood movies, Lord of the Rings. I remember reading J.R.R. Tolkien's books and imagining and coming up with the landscapes, places, and characters I read about. In a way, those books and movies got me interested and excited about Animation and VFX, and thats when I knew this was something I wanted to pursue as a career.
Process
I started by referencing actual active volcanoes, like Mount Etna, Stromboli, and Vesuvius, to name a few. Then I moved on to what an active volcano's smoke plume looks like. While all realistic smoke plumes look impressive, they still lack the cinematic look of burning fire and ash and a sense of explosion/eruption one mostly sees in LOTR concept art. Hence, besides referencing some unique 2D concept artwork, I decided to do a quick matte painting before starting my project to help me visualize the end goal more. The volumes were rendered in Mantra, and everything else was rendered in Redshift.
I did a quick matte painting at the project's start to visualize the mountains and framing. The initial idea was to have aliens invade the scene, but I chose not to go ahead for obvious reasons.
Comp Work
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Like any other project, I rendered out the AOVs I needed to reconstruct my beauty pass. In Nuke, I could dial in the color grading and look of my scene on an individual element basis. I like having control over my lighting and colors, and I've found compositing to be one of the determining factors in what makes or breaks a piece.
Houdini Setup for Terrain and Lava
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The terrain was generated using heightfields in Houdini. As with any heightfield workflow, I layered heightfield noises, flowfield, remaps and distorts until I was finally happy with how everything looked. I used a heightfield erode right at the end to generate all of my masks that I could then use to texture the terrain inside of Redshift.
Lava was generated using different types of masks, primarily ambient occlusion masks. I processed the lava mesh through a point VOP that would factor in noises like Worley and Flow and then, based on the alpha luminance, would displace along the normals. This way, I could quickly look dev the swirls and patterns I wanted to appear on the lava mesh. I calculated another ambient occlusion map from this newly generated lava mesh and assigned low-intensity shaders to occluded areas and a high emissive texture to the nonoccluded areas.
Smoke Plume Process
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The smoke plume was simulated using the Sparse Pyro Solver. At its height, the smoke plume is 77 million voxels. Since I was working on an accurate scale, rendering a single smoke plume at the volcano's size was almost impossible. Hence I rendered the plume at a much smaller scale and then instanced seven different versions of the smoke plume (different velocities) to create the final shot.
Since the scene was getting extremely heavy, I turned everything in my scene into a Redshift Proxy, so Redshift could load geometries and volumes without having to recalculate data into the RAM each frame. This way, I could avoid the constant "not enough RAM" crashes and speed up my workflow immensely.
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