You may have seen Houdini used for some of the biggest feature film effects recently, but the software is also used by a ton of smaller studios and productions. That includes the recent ‘Chase It’ TV commercial for Honda - with visual effects by Alt.vfx in Australia.
Working with director Nathan Price from Goodoil Films and agency Leo Burnett, Alt.vfx crafted a series of meteors and explosion impacts as a TV channel news reporter dreams of becoming the main news anchor. Here’s a step-by-step account of how Alt.vfx managed to make the effects-heavy spot with a surprisingly small team.
The final TV ad
To get started, Alt.vfx consulted as much real-life reference as they could for the meteors, including the relatively recent meteor sighting in Russia which happened to be filmed - a rare event.
The impact explosions, on the other hand, were referenced more from Hollywood fare, such as the film The Hurt Locker. “This had some great examples of slow motion practical dirt explosions, which were a valuable reference,” says Alt.vfx head of visual effects Nick Angus.
Although there were some practical explosions undertaken on set, safety concerns and the desire not to damage the Honda cars meant that Alt.vfx would be called upon to provide a greater sense of peril for the explosions.
Alt.vfx’s visual effects breakdown.
The team made extensive use of the Pyro system in Houdini for the meteors and explosions. “We sourced velocity from particle simulations to give us the sort of control we needed,” explains Angus, “I think we ended up generating almost 10 terabytes of volume cache files by the end of the project!”
On this job, Alt.vfx relied solely on Houdini for the effects creation, but Angus also notes that the software can ingest Alembic caches if external animation assets are required. However, Houdini did the heavy lifting in producing scattered particles to instance fallen trees - and in making atmospheric smoke, the meteor, the impact explosion, the various ground explosions, plus additional elements such as smoke trails, shockwaves and embers.
What made this even more challenging was the large number of shots to be completed on a TVC schedule with Alt’s small crew. But here Angus credits the power of Houdini to help with the sims.
One of the truly great advantages of using Houdini is the procedural nature of all the tools. This made our relatively small team exponentially more powerful given that we could essentially use a very small amount of initial setups and iterate them into many varied effect.
by Nick Angus“For the ground explosions, for instance,” adds Angus, “I was able to build a very portable and entirely self-contained system that could easily be moved around and duplicated to populate the landscape with all the explosions we needed.”
In fact, that ability of Houdini to allow Alt.vfx build up so many layers of effects with a small team, Angus says, was key to getting the TV commercial done. He also points out that new members of the team were able to get up to speed very quickly on the Houdini pipe.
“The majority of effects were created by myself, Roy Malhi and Kyle Botha,” states Angus. “The amazing thing is that Kyle had only recently joined us and had no previous Houdini experience. Within a week he was competent with the lighting tools, and within three weeks was creating some really nice pyro effects, and was even building useful tools for the rest of us!”
“On that subject,” continues Angus, “Anna Hilding also joined us at the same time, and also with no previous Houdini experience. Similarly to Kyle, she was lighting shots expertly by the end of her first week, and within a month had learned the fur tools and crafted one of our best-looking furred creatures for a different project.”
“Both these people are seasoned professionals, but I think with the advantage of Houdini they were really able to hit the ground running and transfer their skills into the Houdini world quickly and painlessly. “
COMMENTS
AlexanderWeide 8 years, 3 months ago |
Awesome work!
kaustav 8 years, 3 months ago |
Amazing Work
Bein 8 years, 3 months ago |
Great work guys
Lenkzler 8 years, 3 months ago |
sukoi
Benyee 8 years, 3 months ago |
Great work,especially pyro elements
Niall Horn 8 years, 3 months ago |
Nice Work Pyro Sims/Lighting Look great.
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