Brown Blog Films

Somniac is a short film by Rory Bresnihan that we are producing here in Brown Bag.  The film consists of a Live Action character who was shot on a Green Screen set, then later integrated into a CGI environment

Somniac has presented a few challenges to us when it comes to Digital Effects – here are some of the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them.

Rust:
When the Digger Arms and Digger Monkey characters moved through the scenes they needed to look old and rusted. JP used 3dsmax’s Particle Flow for this, which used the Diggers’ motion/velocity to produce rust particles. Doing it this way meant that pieces of rust would only fall off when the Diggers had sudden moves and stops, giving the falling rust realisic feel.

Dust:

To create the appearance of the floorboards being old we created dust when anything fell heavily onto them. The dust was created with Fume FX which is a plugin for 3ds max, it uses voxels which are similar to particles. The result was a realistic cloud of smoky dust which if done with the default 3ds max particles would have taken a long time to get right.

Oil Particles:

Effects such as the pool of oil that our Live Action character had to walk through required Particles to get the liquid/oil consistency and motion. This was done by JP, who will now explain how he achieved it. Over to you, JP.

JP: “In this FX shot I had to create the illusion that the hero was walking through thick oil, so I decided to do it with Maya Particles and Soft Bodies. The system was very simple but effective. I first created a well segmented plane and then turned it into a Softbody, this way I would have a particle assigned to each vertex of the same plane. After this was done I added a Spring Modifier to the particles and then applied different fields like gravity, turbulence, etc, the particles were set to have a “goal object” which was the same plane. This way each time our hero touched the OILY surface it would react and behave like liquid but then go back to its initial position. The hero was represented by a sphere in the simulation”.

Debris:
In some of the 3d shots we needed wooden floorboards to break up and snap when the Digger Arms marched through the scene and also when anything heavy collided with the floor. To do this I used Havok Reactor which is integrated into 3dsmax and enables the user to give real world dynamics to 3d objects.

JP complimented the snapping of the floor boards with splinters and other debris – back to you JP:

JP:  “For this FX I used an average of 200 to 10,000 particle instanced with pieces of rust and wood which were supposed to come off the Digger arms each time they moved and/or cracked a surface. Then I set up the objects to be the emmiters and VOILA, nice pieces of rust were coming off the diggers when they moved. Thanks to the very nice DISTRUCTION FX setup by Shane (nice one JP, ok carry on – Shane) with reactor this system was able to achieve a realistic look because the system was setup to inherit the movement of the objects in the scene. This systems was also set up to trigger only by the magnitude of the velocity of each object in the scenes. This means they would only be emitted if the objects moved faster than certain speed wich added realism to the shots. Off course fields like gravity, turbulence and collitions were added to the system as well”.

We will have Somniac finished next month to premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh in July, so stay tuned for more updates and images from the team!