This isn’t one of those tutorials that recreates the look from a feature film …well, it is a recreation, but – A recreation that is demonstrated by one of the VFX Supervisors who worked on the actual film.
MAXDEPTH founder VFX Supervisor for Zioc Studios, Timothy Hanson walks through how the ethereal energy emanating from Loki’s scepter during the films opening sequence for the Avengers film was created. Interestingly, the effects started out with an nParticle simulation and then Krakatoa was used to refine the look and renders of the particles to produce the final effect was seen in the actual film.
This is some great stuff. Timothy walks through using Maya nParticles with dynamics, and shows the progression of how the look was achieved using the Krakatoa renderer to drastically bring up the particle count a render the effect.
Krakatoa represents Thinkbox Software’s volumetric particle rendering, manipulation and management toolkit.
Things covered in the video include
- How to emit particles from a geo source driven by a texture map.
- How to use a volume axis field in Maya to manipulate the nParticles.
- How to use the Krakatoa PRT saver to take a 500 thousand particle sim, and bump it up to around 10 million particles at render time.
- Use the “Force Additive” mode within Krakatoa to achieve the desired wispy/smokey effect.
- Finish with Nuke for a little color correction and grading.
Check out the post for Avengers nParticle Techniques with Thinkbox Krakatoa over at MAXdepth.
