VFX

Superstitious Effects Reel

Effects Breakdown

Pixie Dust

I used popcurveforce in Houdini to force the particle streams through the curve that I had created, then layered several different particle streams with different settings to created the misty look of the pixie dust. Next, I copytopoints planes to a different sphere that had been hand animated in Maya to follow the curve. I adjusted the settings of the new sphere popnet to be free-flowing with a slight gravity pull for the clovers to fly out from the stream. I colorized the streams, added a png of a clover to the planes, and cranked the birth rate for all of them before rendering it out.

Portal Effect

Spawned from a pyro simulation, the portal is created by four separate streams of particles differentiated by various noises, and wrangles and animated to open and close.

Puddle Splash

I created an effect that combines a tank ocean sim with a ripple sim that reacts to the characters movements. An ocean tank sim was set up and used as an import to a dopnet where the velocity of the character was used as a static object collider. A droplets group was singled out from this sim and was used as the input for the ripple solver, as well as given sphere geometry through copy to points for the final look. A volume made from the splash sim was used for additional surface movement. The smaller sim was copied to a bigger piece of geometry and fused together.

Shrinking/Disappearing Effect

A combination of particle effects, booleans, and pyro smoke. The cat is animated to go towards the wall where it disappears in a boolean. The intersect between the cup and boolean emits several streams of particles. The smoke uses an adjusted version of the popnet as a guide for the billowing effect. The same effect was applied on the other side of the wall with a shrinked cat.

Dancing Sand Monster

Animated character was used as an emitter for a particle simulation. Multiple particle streams were combined with various forces to give the sand look and feel.

Wanda's Magic

Created by combine separate strings of particles being effected by noise and streaming outward using the normals. A smoke sim was used for the middle density of the effect.

Breaking Mirror

Geometry modeled in Maya with separate geo for mirror and compact. Mirror was pre-shattered and entered back into the breaking sim with glue constraints.

VFX