Death Eaters Smoke trail

#1

Hello everyone,
I’m trying to create this kinda of effect that you can find in the movie Harry Potter.
That smoke trail of the death eaters.
I’m trying to use FumeFx for that.
I’ve searched a lot on the web but didn’t find any useful information about the creation of that.
Do you guys now what software was used?
Will FumeFx take care of the job or should I mix with Particle Flow?
I’m starting some tests, only with FumeFx at the moment, would really appreciate if someone could give me a tip, to improve my workflow? Thanks for the attention.
Cheers

#2

^I’m guessing that it was all propriety software…

Depending on the actual scene scale you’re going to recreate, I’d probably go with a low res fume sim driving particles in pflow, then partition and render in Krakatoa.

If you need or want to do a high res fume sim (could look really cool), I’d suggest using multiple fume grids and overlapping them… like this: http://limjeff.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fumefx-partitioning/ (can also just do it manually depending on the shot) …and can combine this with particles if you wanted.

#3

particles in pflow, then partition and render in Krakatoa.

Could you explain this a little?

Great link.
I’ll study it right now.

#4

AKIK, the death eater smoke effects were done at Rising Sun Pictures in Adelaide.

This was in an email from them a while ago:
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the deatheater smoke etc will all be in Houdini”

They work with a Maya/Houdini pipeline.

But all the effects can easily be achieved in max with FFX, i would look into what Ian suggested. Really interesting read btw.

And yeah, looks like running fume/particles through Krakatoa might be the way to go, and mixing it in post with fume renders.

#5

Thanks for the Houdini tip.
I’m a Maya user but I think with Fume I’ll get better smoke results.

And yeah, looks like running fume/particles through Krakatoa might be the way to go, and mixing it in post with fume renders.

Do you know any good tutorial I could follow to see how this workflow is done?
Never used Krakatoa.

#6

Yup I sure can, sir… basically you simulate a fairly low detail fume grid, making sure you save out velocity channel with the sim. You can use the velocities to drive particles, so you would birth particles off the death eaters, and then have them follow the fume with the “Fume Follow” operator in particle flow. Inside of Krakatoa there is something called partitioning, it’s basically an automated way of changing the random seeds of the inital placement of particles, and caching them out to disk as a .prt (krakatoa) sequence. So you run a simulation, and cache it, then offset the particle positions, then cache again, and so on, each one being a partition. (Krakatoa automates this). It’s generally faster than trying to birth say, 5million points straight out of pflow… so for instance you can run 10 partitions at 500 thousand particles that, when loaded and rendered together in krakatoa adds up to 5 million particles. The real benefit is that if you have a render farm you can have the farm do all the hard work, each machine calculating only one partition (or multiple) at a time, giving you a crapload of particles back in no time. If you don’t have a farm, since pflow is single threaded, you could open multiple copies of max, and run a different range partitions on each instance of max. You can then load all the particles and render them as a points and / or voxels (voxels and points would be separate passes). If you have enough particles, you can get a really nice smooth look. Voxels render as puffs, and can blend together to create softer looking stuff. Particles generally look grainy unless you have A LOT of particles… see here: http://software.primefocusworld.com/software/support/krakatoa/fighting_the_grainy_look.php

I think that about sums it up…

Edit: Oh, and as for using fume, you would either need a huge grid, and lots of ram (if we’re talking the scene scale of that shot in Harry Potter), or using many, smaller grids with a higher detail level that overlap (that don’t interact with each other) would be totally fine, so long as you can still load all the grids into memory to render them. :smiley: Fume doesn’t have the resizable container like maya2011 has… but you can crank the “adaptive grid” setting to help with ram usage on a big grid. Either way, it’d be best to make sure you fit the grid to the animation as closely as possible (with room for the smoke to expand) before you start.

#7

Well, really appreciate all this information Ian.
Fantastic. I’ll definitely have to study this interaction if I want to achieve a that look.
Do you know Ian any tutorial that applies what you have been saying? Or do you think that in here: http://software.primefocusworld.com/software/support/krakatoa/fighting_the_grainy_look.php there’s all the information I need?
Once again a huge thanks for all the information.
Cheers

#8

Well, replicating the look of something found in an AAA movie without any knowledge of the tools you intend to use might take a bit of time. You cannot expect to find a tutorial that guides you step by step EXACTLY towards your goal because these tools can be used in many different ways and it takes months and years of studying how they behave in certain situations. I don’t claim to know everything about Krakatoa, and I wrote 90% of that documentation page. :wink:

It is great though that you are passionate about achieving something you have a clear vision of (even if the template is provided by a movie). I am confident you will get good results if you persist. Btw, you can render at low resolutions in the Evaluation version of Krakatoa (480x360 is the resolution limit) without paying anything, so it should be easy to install and play with it. If you like it, you can also request a 15 days demo to try out the full unlimited version.

I would suggest first taking a look at some of the videos that showcase Krakatoa in conjunction with FumeFX.

Start with the Chinese Television “Ink” video:
http://www.weareflink.com/index_ct.html

Also look at the SPA animation by DekoLT (Valdemaras Dzengo):
http://vimeo.com/1755557

Then look at Matthias Müller’s amazing tests on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MatthiasmVideos
Especially this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c4WYzr30B0

Now that you have some ideas what could be done with the combination of FumeFX and Krakatoa, look at the basic video tutorials on Studio Daily.
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/richmedia/8500.html
While they cover version 1.0.0 of Krakatoa which is nearly 3 years old, most of the basics, especially the deformation of a straight FumeFX simulation along a path using a PRT Loader and a Path Deform WSM are still completely valid. I would suggest creating a general stream of particles moving, say, up along the world Z axis in a very long but narrow FumeFX simulation, then letting them bend along a spline path as shown in the videos. This gives you the ultimate freedom to change the Death Eater’s path without ever resimming the particle cloud again…

Keep on posting here if you have questions.
Good luck!

#9

http://www.intrinsia.net/?p=250 :thumbsup:

#10

Yeah, what they said :smiley:

#11

Huge thanks for the time you all take in answering my questions.
Really hope someday I can retribute all of this, but i’ll try.

My main goal with this is to create a transition where a character appears in the scene. It will not need to have a huge trail because I’m going to focus on the face only. The smoke trail will “transport” the face from left to right of the screen. It’s this transition that I’m trying to create. One thing I now for sure is that I’ll need a lot of detail.
I will upload my tests to here. At the moment I’m only studying on how to achieve that because I have to deliver my Final Animation Project in April 30, after that I will dedicate all my time to that.

Just a quick question, that airplane scene in GI Joe was made with Krakatoa right?

#12

Wow, some interesting stuff here. That partitioning stuff sounds like it could be useful.

I never personally liked the “smoke trail” thing in the Harry Potter films. Being a fan of the series, I can say that this never happens in the books, and in fact, it’s specifically stated that just about no wizard can fly unaided, so when Voldemort shows that he can in a midair chase sequence, it’s supposed to be a big deal. Wouldn’t be as big a deal with me, since Death Eaters are supposed to be all into the dark magic stuff, but then in the OOTP film, the good guys can do it too, with WHITE smoke trails, no less.

I dunno, I never liked it. It created this air of insurmountability when it came to considering what skills were within Harry’s capacity and how much farther it seemed to set the bar up from him, when during the book version of the Department of Mysteries battle, he actually did pretty damn well given he was uno-en-uno with a dozen odd notorious murderers off and on. I’d hoped it was a concept that would remain isolated to one film, much like the third one when they’d appeared to have cut the budget on effects for various spells and made them invisible save for their end-result, but no such luck as we immediately see more Death Eaters pretending to be the “Locke-ness Monster” from Lost in the next film…

#13

Yes. Most of it is fully synthetic (including sky, plane, missile and all of Washington, DC you see there), with Krakatoa being used for the Nanomites eating the plane and the missile trail which was simulated in FumeFX but had to be rendered in Krakatoa for memory limitation reasons.

The Nanomites were rendered in many layers using the Particle rendering mode of Krakatoa. The particle animation was done mostly using Particle Flow and Box #3 Data Operators.

The missile trail though proved to be tricky, because the scene was animated in more or less real-world scale AND in real-world speed. Thus, with the missile moving fast and trying to avoid the chasing plane, the FumeFX simulation grid had to be huge, and only a small portion of it was actually populated voxels. Still, it required around 64GB of RAM to render in Scanline or VRay and we did not have network machines with that much memory to do that at the time. So we tested with getting the data out of FumeFX and rendering it in the newly implemented Voxel mode of Krakatoa. Sitni Sati were very helpful in providing us with the FumeFX SDK so we could make Krakatoa create one particle per voxel directly from the FumeFX simulation and then render the resulting data a bit more efficiently. Since Krakatoa renders one “scanplane” at a time and not the whole 3D volume, it needed less than 600MB for the same data. It might have been slower, but it could be rendered on hundred network machines if necessary as memory wasn’t an issue anymore.
So the missile trail was rendered as direct FumeFX rendering, not PFlow particles driven by FumeFX.
You can watch a video of one of our Siggraph demos last year related to those effects here:
http://area.autodesk.com/player/loader.swf?p=/player/main.swf&f=http://areadownloads.autodesk.com/oc/ibc09/sig09_d2_frantic01.flv

You can also read more about Krakatoa in last year’s movies in my blog:
http://lotsofparticles.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html

#14

Fantastic information Borislav.
What can I said.
Unfortunately I don’t have all that Ram.
Actually my machine is a:
rocessor Intel Core Quad i5 750 2.66Ghz Sktll56 8Mb Box
Motherboard Asus Sktll56 - P7P55D iP55
Pack 4x 2048Mb DDR3 Corsair XMS3 CL9 PC3-12800 (1600) i5-i7

Do you think that 8 GB Ram will provide me some good results?
I’m reading your blog at the moment.

#15

What RAM do you mean? As I said, we used only 600 Megabytes of RAM for the trail to render in Krakatoa. With 8GB of RAM, you should be able to fit up to 300 million particles in memory, that’s an overkill even for most things we do on movies (except for a couple of shots in the past where we went higher, but using multiple layers).

Your machine should be fine…

#16

You can get some real decent fume sims with 8gigs. You may have to use a couple of grids depending on how huge your trail is going to be but since you mentioned it is a head moving from one side to the other I think you’d be well within reason.

#17

Thanks a lot Mr. Borislav.
Like I said I’ll post my tests as soon as I can.
If I have any more questions or doubts about the “manual” of the Krakatoa I’ll tell you.
It’s a shame there aren’t a lot of tutorials out there.
Well just have to study a little bit more and test and test until I get the result I’m after.
Cheers

#18

Hello everyone.
I’ve finished my final animation project but unfortunately because of my university I can’t place it online but if someone is interested I can send them a link from yousendit to download, but don’t tell no one lol.

Just wanted to let you all know that In the next days i’ll start to put some tests online.
Thanks for all the references until now.
If someone knows extra tutorials please share them with me.
Thanks for all

#19

I’m following some tutorials but it’s not easy.
The commands are a lot different.
For example I made FumeFx emitter and created with Particle Flow a FumeFx birth operator.
I’ve opened Krakatoa and rendered the particles but they appear flat black.
I now that if I had some lights I’ll loose that flat look but whats with that black thing?
I can’t find that Override particle colors to change that so I started to mess with everything and I’m using the Override Emission (Use) to change the color. Is this right? Why isn’t using the default color that is in the Particle Flow?
It is not easy to follow the basic tutorials that are online.
I can’t find that Particle Color Controls.

#20

I’ve started with some tests with FumeFx, ParticleFlow and Krakatoa and start playing with Magma Flow. It is not an easy tool, without the tutorials it’s very complicated to follow but it’s impressive the type of images we can get, really great.
Black and white cloud
http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=153166&stc=1
Color cloud
http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=153167&stc=1
Cheers