FXWars! TORNADO DanFX, F3, FREEFORM

#1

This is my first FXWars challange. “Earth goes BOOM!” was going to be my first, but at the time, I was extremely busy with finishing up my schooling, and knew I wouldn’t be able to complete it on time.

I’ve done tornados before (some turned out better than others), but i’m sure this will be my best yet.

A McDonalds distribution center sits about 1/2 a mile across a clearing from my house. A few large warehouses with dozens of semi truck trailers in the parking lot looks to make an interesting place for a tornado to hit.

-Dan

#2

Here’s a little update…

I’ve modeled and textured a semi truck trailer, and photoshopped together my background plate.

http://danchamberlin3d.com/rendered_jpegs/Trailer01.jpg

http://danchamberlin3d.com/rendered_jpegs/Background%20Plate01.jpg

the tornado will end up being a combination of particle flow, afterburn, and fumefx.

#3

I’ve been playing around with the look of the tornado:
http://danchamberlin3d.com/htfiles/fxwars_tornado_test.html

I’m happy with the base, I may end up redoing the funnel, seems a bit clumpy for its size.

#4

That looks very nicely! Im kind of jealous of max’s tools, afterburn seems to rock quite well.

#5

Alrighty…I’ve been hard at work on this project. It is basically finished at this point, now its time to get critiques on it so I can make it better.

Here’s a link to the video:
http://danchamberlin3d.com/htfiles/fxwars_first_draft.mov

Any comments or critiques are greatly appreciated.

Enjoy!

#6

wow i luv the images, wow again very convincing

#7

I just realized that the link wasn’t working, I’ve fixed it and it should work properly now.

If that doesn’t work, it is on Youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ygjKgg2sfk

Though I’d prefer you use the link to the video on my website because of the difference in quality.

#8

Wow man, this looks really very good! :buttrock:The way the truck flies is really cool and quite realistic. Also the ‘landing’ (with the tires breaking of) looks very convincing!

I also love the lightning: the lighting-changes because of it, give the scene a very deep and dynamic look. Did you do that lighting-changes on the barn in post-production? Or with some 3D-tricks? I’d be very interested in a screenshot of your 3D-scene: is only the tornado and truck 3D?

Are you going to add sound also?

Some critiques:
[ul]
[li]The lens-effects on the electrocutions look a bit over-the-top. Maybe that vertical strike could be some more subtle? Also the particles on that seems a bit extreme… Maybe they fly a bit to much away: seems over 5 metres. Maybe it’s nicer to let them dim earlier on? Or to let them fly (‘be sucked’) toward the tornado in a tight flow?[/li][li]On the lightning-strike in the background: the sky could maybe be more bright because of that. Now it seems a bit dull, comparing it with the other ‘in-cloud’ strikes.[/li][/ul]All the best on finishing this off! Congratulations on it: you can be proud of this! :twisted:

(Thanks for your reaction on my project! I posted a response on it in my thread)

#9

Thanks,

All of the light that is cast on the background plate is masked layers in After Effects.

Here’s a screen shot from my 3DS Max file:

http://danchamberlin3d.com/rendered_jpegs/fxwars_tornado_wireframe.jpg

Sound is actually a real weak point of mine, so I’m not sure if I’ll be adding it or not. Usually, when I add sound it seems to take away from the visuals, but we’ll see.

The sparks from the blown transformer are pulled towards the vortex, but now that you mention it, it would probably be better off being pulled in more of a stream. And I didn’t notice the light on the sky from the lightning strike wasn’t brighter than the other strikes, I’ll get that fixed.

Thanks for the suggestions. I appreciate it.

#10

Alrighty…Here’s my final entry for the challenge:

DanChamberlin_FXWars#21"Tornado"(550x280).mov 3.9MB H.264

The tornado’s look turned out different from what I originally had in mind, but I still like it. I was going to use FumeFX to get a fluid motion to the tornado dust, but in the end, I found it too difficult to control the fluids, and went on to use good ol’ Afterburn.

The project was yet another great learning expierence for me, and I’m happy with the result.

Total Time taken: about 3 weeks during my spare time.

A Panasonic DMC-LZ5 - was used for taking the background plate, and some textures.

3DS Max - was used for all of the modeling, lighting, materials, particle systems, and the camera movement. I used Mental Ray for rendering the solid objects (unfortunately the tornado volume must be rendered with scanline)

Afterburn - was used for the tornado volume

Photoshop - was used for texturing.

After Effects - was used for compositing and alot of post work.

My Brother did the sound effects for the piece, because I don’t do sound well. He used ProTools to blent all the sound effects together.

Enjoy!

#11

I’m not in the challenge, but I really like it and want to give some comment if you don’t mind.
I like the coloring and all that stuff and it looks very close to real!
just some little afjustments would give it the final thing. first thing that catched my eye are the very sharp shadows, which make the tornado which has not these shadows looking like floating. I would use very blurry shadows for the flying truck, and first remove the original shadows from the original plate. I know, it’s a pain. when the lightning happens behind the tornado, you added some nice blurry shadows on the grass. that is the most bright moment in the shot, but there is the finest shadow :wink:

Another thing which makes it little CG-looking is the tornados sharp shape. lower density would maybe help, but I know how this increases rendertimes. that’s why I use finalrender…it renders AB about 3 times faster :wink:

and one more last little thing is, that the whole big truck gets lifted up so high, but anything else in the scene isn’t moving. like the other trucks and maybe some roof parts of the building.

all in all, I really liked it! keep it on! :slight_smile:

#12

Dan,

I think this is really good, watched it over a few times now, like your attention to detail. I’ve a couple of questions about how you did it if you don’t mind!

Did you just render it out at a larger size (same aspect as your background plate) and then zoom in after effects? My guess is you did, and that’d have allowed you to simply mask off areas to do the lighting effects in 2d, instead of rendering them in?

The funnel is really nicely rendered I think, even if it’s only scanline and I love your collapsing truck. The funnel being afterburn and particle flow - how’d you approach the truck collapsing to bits, was it a bit of manual work on top of some particle stuff?

Care to share some of your particle secrets?! I’ve only been using pflow a short while now and would love to get my teeth in to something complex like what you’ve just done here.

#13

I am sorry for your lost…
Post your final piece here:
FXWARS TORNADO! Post you Final Entry )

Good luck in the voting!

-R

#14

Judderman,

The original background plate was 2816x1425, it would have taken forever to render everything at that size.

What I did instead, was took the plate into 3ds max as a material, put it on a plane that was the correct dimensions, and made it self illuminated. I then put a noise controller on the camera, to give it a constant movement. Then animated the zoom in and out. This way I could render everything out at the 720x366 that I decided to use, and get the camera movement that I needed so the still image looked like a video.

The lighting effects on the background are just masked layers, in after effects, I took the rendered video of the camera move, and did a 2D track, which got most of the movement for me. Then all I had to do was manually scale the masked layers when the camera was zooming.

As for the trailer smashing into the ground. It was a combination of rigid body simulation, and cloth simulation using reactor. The pieces that fly off were part of a copy that was broken up, then the pieces were partly animated by hand, and then turned into rigid bodies so gravity took hold after they were flying through the air. The dirt clods it pushes as it hits is just particle flow.

I really don’t have much in the way of pflow secrets, everything I did was pretty basic, but if you’re wanting to get to know pflow a bit more indepth, I pretty well tought myself particle flow with the help of the free tutorials offered by Allan Mckay and Pete Draper. My tornado base was actually a heavily modified version of Draper’s tornado tutorial from his Deconstructing The Elements book.

-Dan

#15

Nicely done there Dan. I think If I’d done it I’d probably have rendered it at something like 1500x759 from max and done the zooming in after effects, so if I didn’t like the movement or just wanted to change the camera movement, I wouldn’t have to re-render everything. It’d also save you scaling the lighting effects. I have the luxury of having quite a lot of machines at work to render stuff on so I’m not sure if you have those restrictions, so even at 2k it’d probably not be a problem.

I’ve seen some of Alan Mckay’s tutorials and they seem pretty comprehensive, I’ll just have to stick at it. Seeing your work though definitely spurs me on to create something cool of my own! I think I’m getting there, slowly though not ready for fx wars yet…

So you used a mixture of reactor and particle flow. Is it possible to combine the two? I’m aware of Alan McKay’s work but finding example based tutorials for reactor isn’t as obvious.

Regards,

Judderman

#16

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