Red Chillies VFX - De Dana Dan

Red Chillies Entertainment was founded in 2002 by Bollywood legend Shahrukh Khan and his wife Gauri Khan. Since its inception, Red Chillies has produced many recent successful Bollywood films including Om Shanti Om and Billu. Much like Bollywood itself, Red Chillies Entertainment is rapidly expanding. They now produce commercials for television and they also own a professional Indian cricket team. To create computer graphics and visual effects they founded Red Chillies VFX.

Recently, Red Chillies VFX added Houdini to their growing operation. Right away, Houdini proved its usefulness in an important scene in their latest production De Dana Dan directed by Priyadarshan and produced by Venus films. In this romantic comedy, two down and out guys are spurred on by their wealthy girlfriends to come up with enough money for them to elope, otherwise their engagements are off. In an attempt to meet this demand the two men resort to kidnapping a millionaire’s dog and the shenanigans begin.

Visual effects were needed for a key scene where the main characters cause the flooding of an entire luxury hotel, with water surging through all levels of the tall modern structure. Since flooding a real hotel was clearly not feasible, Red Chillies decided to get their feet wet with Houdini, using its fluid tools to add water without the fear of drowning the production team.

In the shot, the audience has a bird’s-eye vantage point of the hotel, overlooking its modern triangular shaped atrium. Each floor needed to be overtaken with fast moving water complete with suitcases and hotel guests getting whisked away in the wet mess. Much of the water also needed to cascade over the sides of each floor.

“The top five floors which are closest in view were setup with multiple water layers moving at various speeds in order to make the shot look realistic” says Harry Hingorani, VFX Production Director at Red Chillies. “The layers include a base water layer, a surface foam layer and then a layer for foam at the edges as it meets with walls and objects floating in the water.”

The base water layer was a fluid simulation accomplished using Houdini’s volume fluids. The team was able to quickly establish the basic flow of the water and maintained a lot of control throughout the process. Using the velocity generated by the fluid simulation, foam particles were advected, so that they follow the same flow and speed.

The foam particles were rendered from above and then used as a displacement map for the base liquid simulation. This added more detail to the base liquid simulation without requiring a heavily detailed simulation. The same map was then used in the color channel to render the foam. In the final composition, the water was rendered in Houdini Mantra using a shader comprising of a displacement map, a foam map and other water properties.

“With Houdini, our fluid simulations no longer require lengthy production times that detract from the time we need to make creative decisions,” says Harry. 

We can now make changes late into production and Houdini’s distributed fluid simulations along with the overall procedural nature of the platform let us push the limits as we increase the quality of our simulations.

Recently, Side Effects Software has been working with partners such as Frameboxx for training and Real Image Media Technologies to bring Houdini to the 3D market in India. The VFX team at Red Chillies is one of the earliest adopters of Houdini in India and were able to get it into production in a very short period of time.