In Method Studios most recent Super Bowl spot for Kia, a son asks his father the age-old question of “where do babies come from?” The response leads Method to an epic CG project and Houdini made it possible to include a variety of visual effects elements for the spot including clouds, water, fur, smoke and fire.
In the spot, dozens of furry baby characters from all corners of the animal kingdom are thrust into space from their home planet of Babylandia and are set on a course to be delivered to their new parents on Earth. The project involved dozens of characters, hundreds of shaders, thousands of objects, and 1662 textures. Flexibility and time-saving techniques were key and with Houdini in their pipeline it was no problem to handle such a wide range of assets.
Houdini And The Method Pipeline
Houdini gave Method Studios a means of bringing together CG elements that were generated using other 3D applications to form modular assets that were populated throughout the spot. Because of Houdini’s procedural nature, artists had flexibility to finesse every detail right down to the last minute, bringing everything together without requiring excessive kickbacks to upstream departments.
“Houdini's architecture in combination with Alembic provided us with a stable 'out of the box' pipeline that allowed things to be organized and sharable across the team” says Brian Burke, CG Supervisor. “Controlling and managing scene complexity was fairly straightforward and chaos-free”.
Houdini Fur Tools
This project involved a wide range of cute, furry creatures. Due to the scope of the project many of Method Studio’s artists found themselves working to develop a range of fur looks.
In preparation for this task they created a time-saving ‘grooming’ network template using Houdini’s Fur Tools in order to get these artists up and running right away. That same ‘grooming’ network was then used for the creation each animal’s individual fur look.
“We added a system for publishing versions of the final grooms, as well as a publishing system for fur dynamics using Wire simulations” says Corinne DeOrsay, TD/Lighter at Method. “This kept every asset neat and similarly organized and sped up the grooming and per-shot fur simulation dramatically”.
Pyro FX
For the rocket launch sequence, the team created a procedural setup on one rocket to generate its trail curve and set a path for the volume container to align to. From there, the rockets could be wedged on the farm and within minutes they could generate trails for as many rockets as needed.
“For the launch shot we took advantage of the power of Houdini’s Pyro FX solver” remarks Jonathan Vaughn, Lead FX Artist. “We ran a couple of hero sims which were then instanced to provide a much denser effect. For the rocket trails and base launch smoke, we used Houdini’s Pyro FX clustering”.
Clouds
To develop the cloud shots, initial shapes were setup and defined using metaballs. In later stages the clouds were sampled in CVEX, advected through noise patterns and then sculpted into clouds. In this process, artists were given an option to sample low resolution CVEX volumes if more accurate visualization was required in the viewport.
"This type of setup kept the scene light while providing Mantra with infinite volume detail” says Tomas Zaveckas, Lead FX Artist.
Water
Because of Houdini's flexible workflow, Method Studios was able to develop a custom water surface deformer that could fit the project's needs in only a few days. The limitless combinations of deformation techniques available using vex operators (VOPs) along with the speed of compiled VEX execution allowed them to rapidly prototype a mesh deformation system without having to write a plugin, as necessary with other software packages.
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