VFX on Phoenix 9 made with Blender

Alexander Weide talks about the VFX work he did on the short Scifi film 'Phoenix 9'.

Check out the Short Movie Phoenix 9. I was part of the VFX Team and i believe we all done a good job. It was hard to accomplish the vfx, because of budget and time, but i think we done our job well.When i start to work on the project i thought, it would be nice to use Blender because it is fast and a robust pipeline for VFX. I got a lot of experiences by using it, in such cases. For Compositing we choose Nuke most of the time.

My first task was to matchmove the cameras of around 8 shots in the basement scenes. I used Nuke and Syntheyes for doing that. Then i had to import all camera tracks into the scene. But there was a problem because all tracks got different scene scales and orientations. To correct it, i used a special way with constraints in Blender to match every track even for set changes in the future.

So it took around one week to match everything. I could say, i tried to solve the problem in Houdini and don´t got it like i want. Even in Syntheyes it was not possible for me. But Blender done the job.

After the tracking process, i and the production thought about the look and feel of the set extension. We done it in Blender. Later, i added some simulation to the ceiling and some details.

The key to get the shots looking natural was to desaturate the shots by adding a smoke layer in the set itself. The viewer cannot see them clearly, but it enhanced the look in all shots. So i created a smokesim for every shot. To reuse the model and for saving memory i used the link/reference way. So i was able to change the shaders and parts of the set in the correction phase. Region Five finished the shots later and added my old tornado sequence in the background, enhanced the color and finished the rotoscoping masks.

The most amount of work I´ve done was the Nukeblast sequence itself. I can say it was hard, challenging and i think the final sequence look amazing. But it was hard work for more than 3 weeks.

First was the City. We had to buy a LIDAR Scan Model of a large us city. We thought San Francisco could fit well because of the mountains and the harbor area. But then the problems started, every building got a 8k texture. Cycles was not able to render 2000 - 8k Files. So it had to remap and resize all textures to 4 - 16k Maps. Every building of these 70 thousand buildings got a 32 - 256 pixel map area. We thought that would be enough for our needs. I get it done by baking the textures down in the blender internal render engine.

For smoke i choosed one of my old smoke setups inside Houdini and exported them after simulation to Blender via Point cloud obj file. Why Houdini? Because blender got a nice smoke tool, but its not possible to create different air layers, air temperatures and different wind directions in the simulation. I reused and adapt the setup for all smokesims including dust creation. In the last week of production blender was able to render volume in cycles via gpu. So i rethought my workflow and exported the vdb volumes as obj meshes, to render the shockwave in cycles.

The whole obj sequence - import is done via Meshfoot nodesystem addon from Atom(his community name).

But i miss the importer for alembic and true vdb into blender. That is a must have for the future!I believe the possibility to import alembic into blender is a must have. There is no way around it. Because its industry standart today. After i get the nuke simulation from the production(done by other artist) i composed everything in Nuke. So everything is rendered in Cycles except the nuke itself and the smoke in the city. The groundblast/shockwave is rendered in Cycles.

Finishing and color correction is done by Region Five, they added some foreground wind effect, too.

So without saying too much check out Phoenix 9. Special Thanks to Amir Reichart, Double Vision Films, Salamander Productions and the Guys of Region Five and all the Others which gave me the opportunity to work on the show.

Cheers,

Alexander Weide (@Alexander_Weide)