Orion Terry – VFX Artist at Zoic Studios, has done a short-film REACH – Part 1 and He is kind enough to share us the exclusive Making of of the Shot. Before we go into in-depth article let’s check out the film:
REACH – Part 1
REACH – Part 1: Making of
Hello CG Record readers, Please let me introduce about myself – My name is and I’m a passionate CG Artist from Israel, currently based in Vancouver. I had the pleasure of being part of great projects over the past few years, such as music videos for Coldplay (“Hymn for the Weekend” and “Miracles”), Maroon 5 (Don’t Wanna Know) and more. Since I moved to Vancouver BC, a couple of years ago, I studied in Think Tank Training Centre and later joined Zoic Studios as a CG Generalist. I had the pleasure of being part of a few fantastic TV shows, such as “DC’s Stargirl”, “The Right Stuff”, “Fargo” and “Space Force”.
I consider myself an eternal student in this field, forever learning from personal projects and my fellow peers. I’m always on the lookout for new and exciting opportunities. And here is how I produced the film.
Beginnings are always the most difficult part.
I began production on “REACH” during my mentorship at Think Tank Training Centre in Vancouver BC, Canada. In most cases, students tend to work on a single image artwork as their mentorship project but as my end goal was to jumpstart a career in Visual Effects, I wanted to push myself and work on a CGI sequence. I was fortunate to meet great people along the way and one of them is Think Tank’s Co-Founder – CEO, Scott Thompson, who supported my goals. Before I started my mentorship, I did a few, small personal projects. One of them was my modeling, rigging and look-dev practice of a robotic arm. Scott suggested I should continue it and create a little story between a robot and a child. I immediately started developing an idea.
My first inspiration came from films such as “Man of Steel”, “Gravity”, “Life”, “Interstellar” and more. I adore those films, among many others, often dissecting shots and appreciating the cinematography, visuals and storytelling. They played a key role in my initial development.
I always liked sketching at home and playing around with 2D animations, which came in very handy and natural for me, to create a dynamic storyboard for my ideas. With every new sketch, my short story began to form shape. This stage was the most important part in the process, as it defined the most basic requirements for the project.
Thanks to the storyboard, I knew exactly how many assets I’ll need and what kind of role they’ll play. From that point, I began creating a previsualization, following the storyboard’s timing and compositions.
This process flushed out my ideas even further. I used 3D Studio Max to model proxy objects and place cameras around the scene. I was able to control lenses now and I had complete freedom to push each shot further as I saw fit, in order to try and maximize the potential of each frame.
After doing some research on reentries and space shuttles, I started animating the pod by hand, using a spline to dictate its trajectory. That allowed for flexible art direction.
The speed of a space shuttle on reentry to earth is approximately 17,500 mph and to avoid dealing with an incredibly massive scene scale and ridiculous speeds, I normalized those values to Mach 1.
I then began creating “playblasts” for each camera and laid them out in Adobe Premiere for a rough cut. After receiving some really great critique on my storyboard, this was the perfect opportunity to tighten and polish the sequence.
Hello, Houdini.
Up to this point, I was fairly in my comfort zone. I’ve been a 3D Studio Max user for over 10 years. I had quite a few years of experience with FX as well, using plugins such as FumeFX, Krakatoa and Stoke.
This was all great, but most VFX studios these days are using SideFX Houdini, and I was hoping for my future integration in that industry. As a person who thrives from challenges, I knew I had to step up to that one!
I started to look for a good mentor at my school’s mentorship program and this was where I got to meet Albert Szostkiewicz, FX Supervisor at DNEG Vancouver which had an amazing background and vast knowledge in a variety of Houdini solutions. His experience in a high-end professional pipeline was immense, and so we sat down and I introduced him to all of my ideas.
ORGANIZATION
One of the first steps was project organization, folder hierarchy, pipeline, workflow and shots assembly.
Albert introduced me to a nice way of rounding up my outputs into a single, multi-layered sequence in my editing software which helped navigating through the outputs of every department in a very organized manner.
This way, I could structure my project similar to a professional VFX production and for every next step of my work, we have treated as such. We also gave the project a cute code-name for simplicity sake.
REFERENCES
Another important step in my production was collecting references. I can never appreciate this stage enough, as it’s always one of the most crucial ones!
We have collected pieces of movie references, real space footage and YouTube videos.
Multiple concept references for the escape pod were collected, as well, made by a lot of talented artists. The one that struck me the most was a concept made by Henry Fong. I felt it was compact, original, simplistic yet elegant, fitting for my idea. I touched up the concept in Photoshop, altering the color palette and proportions slightly in order to fit my storytelling ideas.
LAYOUT
This was the moment where I had to start cleaning up my previs and stepping out of my comfort zone. I began breaking down each camera into separate scenes, per shot, with its own subfolders and shot names.
Since every shot used to co-exist in a single scene, it made my life so much easier in the next stages. Especially Lighting!
TEXTURING and LOOKDEV
After modeling and UV mapping my assets in 3dsmax (house, fence, pod and mailbox), I used ZBrush for detailing and Substance Painter for texturing, as it felt very intuitive and easy to use. I was able to paint the smallest details based on an average of my shot’s requirements, prepare logos, alphas and control reflections and diffuse reaction to light with a quick feedback.
The terrain received a similar treatment and was later amplified by a few SOP nodes in Houdini for extra detail and variation.
All exported maps were later converted to RAT format (Mantra’s favorite!) and I began look-development until satisfactory results.
FX – (The juicy parts!)
While I was very fresh to Houdini and still learning the UI, Albert was slowly introducing me, broadly, into physics and math, which are immensely useful in this department.
The first effect I wanted to develop was the reentry effect. Thanks to references I’ve put together previously; it was easier to break it down into smaller pieces and set a visual goal. Primary and secondary effects.
In my previous 3dsmax projects, I often used a “brute force” approach and did whatever works for that specific shot.
Thanks to our lessons, I’ve started thinking in a more optimized and technical way, which allowed me to simulate much faster (in some cases almost instantly), therefore I could spend more time on the artistic side rather than waiting for a simulation to finish.
For this reason, I decided I want to localize the fast-moving pod to the world’s 3D origin, aka, the “0, 0, 0”. I was able to control my simulation with ease. No voxel was wasted.
With each technical lesson, I started coming up with new and better ideas of how to approach my FX.
When it came to the explosion/impact effect, I felt overwhelmed at first, due to its scale and intensity. However, understanding that eventually the final result sums up to a few pixels on a screen, simplified the idea for me while breaking it down to its basic elements. I was able to overcome those concerns and work my way up to completion.
The crater deformation was created via hand animated blend-shapes, initially sculpted in ZBrush. It gave me full artistic control over something which will only be visible for a handful of frames on-screen.
For the vegetation, I adopted Quixel Megascans for the first time, using their Bridge interface. It communicated with Houdini beautifully and allowed me to scatter various, carefully picked vegetation assets in strategic places for each shot, with ease.
I was able to animate them using existing Quixel SOP nodes and added a little bit of my own via VEX, for impact force reaction.
Speedtree was also used to generate trees, scattered around the environment. It was fairly easy to get a simple simulation, reacting to the impact force of the explosion.
The fire was simulated with Pyro, using a rather simple setup. My goal, first and foremost, was to nail the timescale. Something a lot of fire simulations lack in. I later proceeded to introduce more detail into my sim.
LIGHTING
Thanks to our professional VFX structure, I have created the initial layout in same world-space. This allowed me to quickly set key and fill lights for whole sequence and have a general feel. I’ve tried to stay consistent across the shots following the sun and moon’s positions in space, helping the viewer to understand exactly where each shot is situated relatively to each other.
Of course, I had to tweak a few shots on their own, and that’s where the artistic calibration comes in, to bring out the most important parts of the scene to life.
During this point in the project, I came to love and appreciate lighting more than ever, as you start to shape your storytelling elements even more and learn to sacrifice some of your own work for it. Even though I have crafted extremely fine details for an asset or worked on a specific effect for quite a while, I found that to achieve a good frame, guided by realism, artistic direction and general esthetics for the sake of the story you’re trying to tell, you sometimes have to “hide” some details in the shadows.
COMPOSITING
During my mentorship, I have learned about proper workflow with AOVs, its usage and great power. This came in handy even during the lighting stage. I could render all my lights in separate channels, together with diffuse and specular passes and interactively manipulate each aspect of my lighting conditions, including some shading modifications, directly in Nuke.
Once I was happy with the change, I could easily re-adapt it to my final renders with no effort.
Another great technique I’ve learned about, was deep compositing. This gave me an amazing workflow flexibility! For example, I could have rendered morning fog for one of my shots, once, and still completely change any of the elements underneath it, without the need to re-render it.
Being able to visualize deep data in a 3rd dimension within Nuke was very handy for my workflow. I could see in perspective where each element is situated and how to properly set up focal plane to travel across the scene.
Nuke also helped me a lot with environments and matte painting. With ease, I was able to create simple geometry, on which I could project my digital paintings. This solved various parallax issues and helped me with shot integration overall.
I used this technique to approach the earth, backdrops for the farm environment and even in some cases, projected my own renders on the original geo to avoid having to render them in Mantra.
Part 2?
When I began developing this project, I didn’t know Houdini or Nuke that well. I never stepped into such a big workflow, either. deep down, I knew how ambitious it was and how long it might take. And as the “Pi Rule” saying goes, always multiply your estimate by π.
As I started production on REACH, I quickly realized that I will have to break it up into two parts, to avoid a burnout and not let it drag for too long. Overall, learning this workflow took me around 6 months. Completing the first part took another 4 months.
Being able to accomplish the first part actually gave me an additional mental boost and willingness to continue working on the second part.
As an artist and generally, a person, I accept mistakes as a natural part of the process. Make them once, learn from them. Thanks to all the mistakes I have done during production and thanks to the guidance of my mentor and Think Tank Training Centre, I learned a lot. I am excited to apply that knowledge to any of my future productions, which hopefully will teach me even more.
Beginnings are always the most difficult part, it’s like staring at an empty piece of paper, but after the first, initial stroke towards a smaller part of your idea, everything skyrockets.
Thank you and looking forward to share the Part 2 to you all soon!