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THE USB PARADOX

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Role

3D Generalist / R&D

Collaborators

Felix Foltas

Rosemarie Haider

Philipp John

Marco Mittendorfer

Renato Nunes

Jonas Perkmann

Jan Pscheidt

Bernhard Riedl

Nico Urthaler

Clemens Willberger

Duration

2 months

2024

Tools

Houdini

Nuke

§ Project Description

I was approached by Clemens Willberger to assist during the Research & Development phase of the project. My work focused on creating and refining key visual effects, including lightning strikes, water droplets, and volumetric effects, which helped define the project’s atmosphere.

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§ Process

I was assigned to various parts of the R&D Process. So my part of the project was not to create the final image, but find ways to create efficient workflows and assets that could speed up the production process. This included a way to render waterdroplets, lightning strikes, volumetric dome lighting for the spaceship lights aswell as HDRI's and cloud assets.

§ Waterdroplets

One of the first tasks that I was assigned was to find ways to create sliding waterdroplets on the surfaces of the spaceship. I started with a fully rendered approach but after I noticed that I could also fake it in Nuke and thus have a lot more control over all aspects of the image, I stayed with that approach. Even though, if you want the most realistic result out of the box and not the most efficient, then prolly rendering it, might be the better fit.

Hydro Glide Glass Dome Test, rendered in KarmaXPU.
Tried out the setup in a setup which more suited the actual usecas. I especially liked the details of the dried water I put on the windshield.
Expanded the scene a bit with 3D Pieces from the actual set and a quick environment, just to have something in the background.
Here the is barely visible, but this already uses Nuke Displacement to render out the raindrops in nearly realtime and also highly flexible using a st-map.

§ Lightning

As you might have seen already, the shots of this short ad are full of lightning strikes and volumetrics. So my mission was to find a simple and effective way to render those. In the end I delivered over 40 variations of lightning strikes to the rendering & compositing team. It all started with a point cloud and then one step after another added features like branching, and twitching.

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First lightning render test animation in KarmaXPU hitting the ground, because at some point the lighting should hit the spaceship.
Added branches, and flickering to those, so they will not only check one path but multiple and occasionally switch between them.
Method to separately render the volume and lighting effects so be able to control its effect in compositing.
Rendered little experimental version for reference on how these effects could be combined. Spaceship by Jan Pscheidt, rest done by me in KarmaXPU & Nuke, slapping on some spaceship material and using both volumetric rendering for the close clouds and also cards I rendered out from Houdini in compositing for the BG, so I could control the lightning control in post.
Not "Lightning" but "lighting", just gonna slap that in this section too, as I was also working on a way to create these headlights efficiently. Learned a lot about rendering those in Karma, e.g. that theres a difference between uniform sampling and variance sampling.
Little breakdown of what I was mentioning before. Rendering all of these elements separately actually saves render time, especially when minor details of the spaceship change.

§ HDRIs & Clouds

When you got these amounts of shots, it's always useful to have a background for any angle imaginable. Thats why I created a set of Clouds & HDRIs that could be placed anywhere. For the more organic looking clouds in the foreground we used some of the clouds in the VRAY Library accessible online.

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Realtime Preview of the HDRI in Houdini Vulkan.

§ Complete Breakdown

If you had'nt enough breakdowns already, you can check out the complete breakdown below, which includes a the ton of work that was put into rendering, compositing, lighting, modeling and so on.

§ Learnings

Nuke

â—‹ Nuke 3D System e.g. 3D Cards & HDRIs
â—‹ Various Distortion Methods

Houdini

○ 360° Rendering in KarmaXPU
â—‹ Volumetric rendering
â—‹ Various ways to render water effects on geometry

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© Jona Melvin Grobe