Client: U.S. Marines

Studio: Framestore

Role: FX Artist (digital growth/degrowth , destruction rigid body, smoke)

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I worked on this ad for the U.S Marines with a dream team of artists at Framestore. Early in the process I was tasked with developing the fx system for buildings and trees materializing and dematerializing to show the shifting landscapes that the marines find themselves in. The client wanted a digital pixelization look but with a bit more sophistication. So I created a growth system in Houdini that utilized vertical blocks on its leading edge. But applying this effect in production over the entire landscape was not a simple task by any means. We had hundreds of thousands of trees and hundreds of building which alone would require a careful instancing workflow. But to add in a per element growth solver on top of that meant for every variant of building or tree, I would have to cache out a full cycle of its growth simulation as an animated sequence that could be read back into the scene as an instance. And then I was able to use a more global spreading mask to trigger the animated instances to create an entire landscape shifting in cascading succession.