I created this personal project to evolve my skills in FX and create more complex pyro effects that would later be rendered using Karma XPU in a scene assembled in Solaris. I have rendered the plate and the different effects individually so I could have further control over the look of them in Nuke X. Sound design was carried out inside Adobe Premiere Pro.
Software: Houdini FX - Nuke X - Adobe Premiere Pro
Starting with the Moodboard, the idea was just to have a scene that would accommodate the FX without being the centre of attention. I wanted to refine my texturing skills by creating the plastered floor with imperfections and play around with the roughness values and how it would reflect the explosions. Adding to this, I studied how to create explosions inside Houdini FX and rendering them using Karma.
I created the explosion, by starting out with a pyro burst node, and using it to drive a particles simulation. This would allow me to control my explosion using pop forces and obtain the shape I wanted for my explosion. After I had the base for my explosion, I used the product of my POP simulation to drive my Pyro, using a Pyro Solver SOP node. I repeated the same process for my shockwave, with the only difference being the initial pyro burst node, and a few changes in my POP simulation
For the tank firing, I have used the same principle as my explosion, by also using points on the barrel of the gun so drive where the starting point of the explosion would be. The tank was animated to show a small recoil and a kick when it fired, and I used that geometry to drive my collision for my shockwave and smoke emitting from the vehicle. Finally for the muzzle smoke, I used a selection of primitives at the front of the gun barrel and used the as emitter for my smoke. I exported everything as USD and imported it into Solaris, where the rest of the scene was created. I added my wall and floor and I textured them using MTLX nodes inside a Karma material builder. I added the lights for my scene and used a light mixer and light linker node to control them further. Everything was rendered individually after this and imported to Nuke for further treatment.
In Nuke, I utilised the Keyer node to create a luma key and add variation for the temperature in the explosions. Using the same method I created another key and inverted it, to treat the smoke of the same simulation and have more control over it's look. Glow was later added using a apGlow gizmo and a few small changes with the help of some grade and multiply nodes.