VFX

The VFX were one of the film's biggest challenges. The shots were too static, lacking movement and life. Thus we added wind effects il our hairy molds, subtle enough to not create visual clutter. Then, we had to tear a tree in half as well as the ground.

Finally, we hcreated the rain in Maya.

VFX - Wind

Our molds all have two separate wind effects in the groom : a subtle one for the majority of the scenes, and a strong one for the Chaos sequences.

Creating the simulation with nodes was the easy part ; the longest part was waiting for the simulations to render, while managing caches and tweaking settings to get the best result.

VFX - Rips

The tears were an essential but complex aspect, since we wanted to have a chaotic and destructive sequence that could only be done with fx. While none of us were specialized in FX, we did pass this hurdle as well.

VFX - Rock and Spore

The flying rocks and spores were simpler to make. The main problem was the speed at which they passed the camera. First of all we had to do a whole set up for the motion blur that would be used later in compositing, and once in Nuke we the particles sometimes moved too fast for the software to pick up the information.

VFX - Rain

As opposed to the rest of the FX that were made in Houdini, the rain was done in Maya with MASH systems as the original simulations from Houdini were simply too heavy for the servers. In the end, the motion blur and lighting give a natural feel of tiny drops seen up close.