Tornado (vfx shots)

[broken]

These are a couple of shots we produced for an internal corporate video, involving a hallucination sequence where a worker gets ripped out of his cubicle by a tornado.

It's our first production use case of the volumetric render engine (sim_physics branch) that we've been developing here at ProMotion. We modelled the set from photos and matte paintings, and the tornado was created with several particle systems. We rendered it in HD as a volume, using a mixture of several 'point density' textures (creating density information from point clouds), alongside procedural textures, and procedural displaced turbulent detail. There's more info on the volume rendering tools scattered throughout this thread or on my website.

large res (11mb)
small res (4mb)

[craigomatic]

Bravo, very convincing details. Wish it would hit my office and clean up a little Nice job!!

[ledd]

Awesome!! all of this was made in blender ?? Does it promotion studio use gimp for texturing ??? Really amazing.

[ocularb0b]

wow, very cool. Great example of what can be done with blender when you really know what your doing. How did you handle camera path matching?

[yellow]

Interesting, reminds me of a TV advert rather than a believable vfx shot, but quite an achievement non the less. Not sure about the lighting, density of cloud and unrealness of building fabric being lifted. Really like the bit where the person is in the eye of the storm looking up.

How did you do the tree movement, from the screen grab they don't look cg.

[M@dcow]

Brilliant work Broken.

It must give you an amazing sense of achievement to both work on coding the sim_physics branch and to actually use the fruits of your labor for real production work. I still remember your first posts on Blender.nl, and I have to say, you've come a long long way since then.

[popski]

Oh man, Hollywood in Blender! Excellent!

[john_9998]

Nice, very realistic. Good job! : )

[ibkanat]

yea!!! Finally get to see this great work. Great job again broken. Trust me it isnt as easy as it looks. Its allot easier once you have someone giving you the right settings.

[Ace Dragon]

The physics branch in action, good work on that, the tornado looks quite good for a Blender particle system, probably because particle effects that good are only possible in the physics branch

[broken]

hey dudes, thanks for the kind comments!

ledd: no, we generally use photoshop

ocularb0b: well, the guy himself was filmed from far away at an angle similar to what we needed, so it was just a matter of rotoscoping him out of the background, and comping that footage in the middle of all the building/tornado. Everything except the man was completely generated in CG/matte painting, so we didn't really have to worry much about matching cameras.


yellow: Yeah, it's not really like a realistic serious shot from a film though - the entire video is in a surreal joking style. One moment he's in his office surrounded by babes in bikinis, then the next moment the ceiling is ripped off. It's all a bit of fun

The trees are indeed CG, it was a bit of a difficult process. I pulled them out of the background plate in PS, then rebuilt the streets and buildings behind them. Then I cut it up (and cleaned it up) into small chunks of branches and leaves with alpha, and brought those into blender as images mapped on planes. To animate it, I built a 'trunk' and attached those planes on with vertex parents, subdivided and weight painted, then used cloth sims on the trunk and all the branches/leaves with a wind field, to get the motion. There's also an animated displace modifier on top of that for the fine details.



If you look carefully at them, the movement isn't fully realistic, and the trees in the matte painting aren't moving either, but hopefully viewers will be too distracted by the tornado to notice

cheers!

[reynante]

Woooooaw! That is breathtaking! I love looking at all those objects flying around. And the guy seemed so happy with it. ^_^

[congcong009]

Hey, you should make a real movie!!!!

[yellow]

Originally Posted by broken .......the entire video is in a surreal joking style. One moment he's in his office surrounded by babes in bikinis, then the next moment the ceiling is ripped off. It's all a bit of fun

And you left the babes out of the clip. :-( That would have put it more in context. :-)

Thanks for detailed description of the trees. I'm getting a few projects together to try out some vfx this year, once the weather gets better and get out to shoot some video plates, 2D 2.5D projection etc. So looking out for as much knowledge as I can can, thanks.

[malefico]

The more details you reveal the more impressive your work looks ! Well done !

[BbB]

Amazing stuff. Your workflow for the trees is very ingenious and the result is convincing!
It might seem like a tiny detail, but how did you go about doing the quake-like cam-shake?
B

[broken]

Hi!

I forgot to also mention there's a hair particle system on the trees as well, with some leaf objects instanced for a bit more fine detail.

BbB, ah, the camera shake was done in post, we comped it in Fusion.

[meschoyez]

just a jawdrop. A big one. I admire your work!

[tatasoka]

Excellent work!

[Sim88]

-respect for not including babes in bikinis
+respect for the nice CG work