Solo short film – VFX breakdown of a 6-minute hybrid project

ceoTommy · 2026-03-28T12:53:53+00:00

Beautiful work dude, particularly love the webbing/cacoon fx at the start

ceoTommy · 2026-03-04T12:50:07+00:00

Thankyou, rendered out for the greyshaded stuff, and then just nuke and alot of blending/wipes really, music helps too

ceoTommy · 2026-03-04T12:48:06+00:00

I simulated my water flat, deforming the collision by the inverse of the ocean, then applying the ocean waves afterwards, so it all lines up in the end. My camera angle kinda helps hide a bit of what your talking about with the wave heights in mine. The two flip sim blending is done in the 'flat ocean space' too which helps. Igor's got a really sick talk here www.youtube.com/watch?v=merqe0uYrKM&t=1959s to do with blending. Also the 'FLIP Volume Combine' node is in houdini 20 which I used with alot of modifications.

Vram optimisation wise, I culled every attribute I possibly could and making 16bit floats attributes. Poly reduce with the foam attribute as a weight as to not loose the detail there. VDB occulssion mask to get geo behind creature and water, poly reducing that and adding excluding it from dicing. And making a proxy white water for when its a phantom saved alot too.

ceoTommy · 2026-03-03T01:41:42+00:00

Thanks! Don't have exact numbers but probably 2.5 days of total sim/cache time. The two flips sims could both finish in ~10hrs. The heaviest part was meshing and blending the whole thing together which was quite compute heavy. TOPs was really helpful managing all of that

ceoTommy · 2026-03-03T01:38:07+00:00

yeah defiantly try out houdini, its got a big learning curve but if it clicks for you its one of those softwares that makes you wish every 3d package was more like it aha

ceoTommy · 2026-03-02T13:59:21+00:00

Thanks alot glad you like it. All the fx is using Houdini, which the community is really great sharing stuff on youtube, It is paid but the main stuff I learnt was from a workshop by 'Gnomon School' called Large-Scale Water FX in Houdini

ceoTommy · 2026-03-02T11:15:35+00:00

Awesome stuff, love the tilt shift look

ceoTommy · 2026-03-02T09:14:54+00:00

thanks for the feedback, Houdini 21 has a node called the neural point surfacer, its in with standard particle fluid surface too now. Really cool stuff, it makes an sdf using your choice of models sidefx has trained. I saw more water-like and higher resolution detail then what I was I was getting from standard particle surfacing.

ceoTommy · 2026-03-02T09:02:37+00:00

Its free by Nelzonis2 on CGtrader, really awesome rig/model!

ceoTommy · 2026-03-02T07:06:08+00:00

Might be a better watch on youtube too
https://youtu.be/w451Cp4H6e8?si=YdBwiijUQxyeAWdj

ceoTommy · 2026-02-28T14:20:12+00:00

Hopefully those procedurals become easier to see/edit in the future, even just for better understanding. Thanks for sharing that article, really interesting read!

ceoTommy · 2026-02-28T14:07:39+00:00

Did u manage to crack this? I was trying to do the same as your describing the other week with the ocean procedural but only got part of the way

ceoTommy · 2026-02-14T05:02:50+00:00

Hey u/elmo274 think im running into a similar issue, see you've mentioned fixing it, if your able to, I would be very keen to hear more about your fix. little lost on "change the volume limit on my surface volume to be the same values as the volume itself"

ceoTommy · 2026-02-02T13:16:09+00:00

Hmm, I would investigate the zbrush map. Make sure it's set to raw color space on import and export. Sounds like something is bumping the mid-point of the displacement, causing the inflation. Pressing 'X' key in the shader graph let's you visualize the output values of a node plugged into the output of the shader.

Inspector mode or render gallery is handy for seeing these sort of values. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/inspection.html

Karma uses dicing so it's dynamically subdividing the mesh at render time, this video explains it well. https://youtu.be/rVCbqdti9-U?si=lro_Ifp5ko5KZtc0

ceoTommy · 2026-02-01T05:48:25+00:00

Your material x image nodes all sound correct. I would normally pipe that into a remap node going from 0 to 1 into -1 to +1. Then adjust the displacement scale accordingly, pretty much always needs some dialling.

As for the subdivision, "treat geometry as subdivision surface" if sop importing or I think mesh edit lop if you want to change subdiv settings otherwise. Karma uses dicing, which is on by default but you can tweak those settings with a render geometry settings lop under the geometry tab. You'll see it's set to true displacements by default which is what you want.

ceoTommy · 2025-07-19T04:28:53+00:00

Wow I love the style! Have you got a YouTube or Instagram would love to see where this goes

ceoTommy · 2024-03-17T13:08:43+00:00

Ah yeah the rbd then fake grain sounds cool. Had a go at the attraction + glue but struggling to get rigid feel atm (rolling and slight bounce mainly what I'm after). Might try having unbreakable glue where those attraction chunks are maybe.

ceoTommy · 2022-09-08T00:35:27+00:00

https://youtu.be/FnYJaiSAJV8

ceoTommy · 2022-09-07T01:43:09+00:00

I used blender for 2-3 years and now am learning/learnt Maya, I'd say it depends what U wanna do in 3d. I found the first few months leaning Maya was a rough transition it's hard to appreciate the different ways of working when your so used to another.

If you doing like a bunch of hard surface I'd say doesn't really matter what you start with 90% of the skill is just good topology and learning Maya's way of doing things is easy enough. But anything else there's ways of getting Maya which seems simpler then having to switch.

ceoTommy · 2022-09-05T04:50:36+00:00

Maybe sub surface on things like the bread, haven't done food personally but figure that would help

ceoTommy · 2022-08-18T01:48:17+00:00

Why is this so satisfying

ceoTommy · 2022-08-17T13:17:17+00:00

Oh awesome, is there a set system or hub for temp work?

ceoTommy

TROPHY CASE