OBELUS
Snow Simulations
Snow flake design created inside of Houdini and then the storm simulation was done using Niagara inside of Unreal Engine 5.5
Snow WIPs
These are current works in progress for creating snow deformations for footsteps. My pipeline includes exporting the animation from Maya as alembics into Houdini where I run a grain vellum simulation. The sim is then exported as a .hbjson file into Unreal Engine 5.5 using the Houdini to Niagara plugin created by SideFX labs. I have been running into an issue where if I have too many particles, the file will not import, however without the smaller particles, it is difficult to get the simulation to actually look like snow. My plan right now is the play around with the materials inside of Unreal to see if that can hide the larger particles and blend them with the scene, or I will pivot and render in Houdini and comp the sims into the scene in post!
Sparks
This metal griding spark effect was created in niagara and will be used in two of our shots where the main character is scratched against metal surfaces. However the animation for those shots are not finished yet so this was just a test to get used to the niagara workflow. Return later for more updates!
First pass of the simulation in a scene! Right now I think I need to work on the collisions for the sim because for some reason it doesn’t want to interact with the actual floor. Right now the collisions are driven by the bounding box of the sim.
Spire Fog
This was an experiment using Niagara’s 3D fog simulations to create this cryogenic fog coming from our battery towers as well as an initial lighting test. These assets are not final and still being worked on. I was also playing with the idea of having smoke come up through the grates on the floor, but I think it might get too foggy at that point. I need to play with the density since we still want to be able to see the wires in the center of the tower through the fog.
Lightning
This was an experimentation with creating a lightning ribbon effect inside of unreal using it’s blueprint section. I think its a good start, however it feels too stylized for the look we’re trying to achieve with the film. I may play around with this some more to try and alter the look, or since we've already switched to using Houdini for the foot prints in the snow, I may just attempt to do this in Houdini as well.