This week I will have completed all the animated renders, including the smoke, the look of the building as well as the shadows, and the rest of the broken vehicles around it.

I layered the rendering inside houdini and set up different levels of lighting to make it easy for me to import into nuke and make changes. As well as I render the buildings separately from the smoke, which will help me to make different adjustments to the objects individually without having to re-render them all over again.

This part is simply merging the elements, as well as motion blurring the smoke, in order to make it easier to hand over to sakshi for final compositing, which is a more tedious task.

I try to take screens inside the houdini and it works for me. Because I can visualise the model collapsing before I render it. And I finally solved those problems I mentioned last week by re-tracking the camera and resetting the parameter smoke.

This allows for a more realistic reproduction of the smoke (debrissource)

Final collapse test results

Firstly, I need to do camera tracking inside nuke so that I can determine the location of the building as well as go to the scene to match it. A big thank you to minhan for using mocha to make a “character roto” which helps with the masks used for tracking.

I imported into houdini by exporting the nuke camera, and these locators below are the axes that used to be in nuke, which makes it tremendously easier for me to locate them.

Firstly, I need to group the models I downloaded online so that I can subsequently paste the materials. And then crumble it.

I ran into a huge problem when dealing with crushing, which took me a week to fix. Many models downloaded from the internet have no thickness but only flakes, however houdini crushes the flakes inside, initially I tried converting to vdb mode but it takes a lot of time and tends to crash if you use this mode, and in the end it doesn’t even render. After going through a lot of tutorials on the internet, I decided that it would be better to process the faces in maya and give them thickness, which is a very tedious step, so if you have the chance it would be better to model it yourself.

I managed to break the staircase in its entirety, next I needed to create the smoke produced during the staircase breaking process.

I used the node “debrissource”, which helps me to identify the particles in the middle of the breakup, through which the smoke is generated.

Still running simulations, I’ve tested at least 4 versions

After importing into nuke, I checked and found a few frames that were missing and had extreme problems with the camera tracking, I needed to fix them.
1.Modify scatter
2.Adjust the camera tracking
3.Redo the smoke spread
4.Re-render

Firstly, we discussed a number of versions of the story, for example identifying the theme as a lonely boy, but due to the difficulty of creating vfx for the story scenes and the lack of logic. So after a lot of discussion we decided to go for “The choice of the plastic bag” and create a vfx for the last part of the video.

So, after the theme was chosen, we explored the plot: the next step was to find a coffee shop where we could film and draw the subplot. The following subplot was drawn by Minhan Lv.

On Wednesday of this week we gathered together in a restaurant near King’s Cross railway station for a three-hour shoot. As I had injured my shoulder, I had to play the role of director to help them out, sakshi did the filming and minhan and mahadev did the roles.

Our plan was to create special effects in this environment, such as a city that starts out as a ruined and destroyed city, and gradually turns into an environmentally friendly green city.

Very enjoyable shoot, first experience of the rigours of shooting. You need to shoot a shot many times to get the effect you want.

Here’s some of our dialogue

Minghan :Hi bro how are you doing

Mahadev: Good ,Good
Is it a plastic bag?

Minghan :yeahh (Pause)
You know these plastic bags are just so convenient. Who cares about reusable ones?

Mahadev :
I do

Using reusable bags is so important for the environment.
Its about making small changes for a better future

Minghan
Oh come on. Whats the harm in using platic once in a while

Mahadev : Imagine a world where everyone thought that way. Our cities would turn into chaotic messes, covered in plastic waste. Pollution would choke our air, and wildlife would suffer immensely.

Minghan : Thats so true, What have we done?

Mahadev: Small choices can make a big difference. Choosing reusable over plastic isn’t just about convenience; it’s about preserving the beauty of our planet for generations to come.

Mighan : You’re right. I never looked at it that way. Maybe it’s time for a change.