An expedition rover notices a solar phenomenon that isn't quite what it seems.
For my third and final short film completed in Texas A&M's Vertical Studio course I served as project manager and lead VFX artist, overseeing both the overall production and much of the FX work. This was the first short I completed utilizing Pixar's RenderMan for rendering. To handle integrating the sun and meteor with the rest of the assets, they were rendered separately in Houdini using RenderMan and later composited into the final output.
To create the solar flares across the surface of the sun, I developed a workflow that quickly generates a variety of different curve shapes and uses them to drive a particle simulation. The particle trails are then tracked and converted into VDBs. This approach allowed me to avoid large-scale pyro simulations, instead using instancing to scatter smaller volumes across the sun's surface.
For the meteor, the main goal was to convey a grand sense of scale the meteor enters the atmosphere and erupting into a massive fireball. The particle emission system was built around varying levels of detail, allowing for the base simulation to be defined first and then gradually refined into the final simulation.
Contact Info
Lane Parrish
College Station, TX
Email: laneparrish04@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/laneparrish04
