This is the breakdown images showing the detail of creating the Obscurus in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them". This is a really abstract developing from scratch. Everything was done by Houdini and rendered in Houdini as well. Based on the animated Lidar facial model and animated low-res starfish model, we can simply apply a set of Obscurus tool to get the final look. I was responsible to do the look-dev based on the artwork from London and create the easy-to-use tool which can be applied from shot to shot in minutes
Based on the Lidar model, we need to make the flat model more organic. This is purely SOP work in Houdini. First, we separate the model into isolated parts, and create bunch of lines in between parts. Also, we use a simple SOP Solver to do a fast simulation growing some additional lines from surface into interior. For each line, we can determine thicker width for both end-points and thinner width for center part. This makes it looks more like synapse system inside the brain. After scattering bunch of points on top of those lines, we use the mesh tool to create more liquid style surface.
With using the same technique from above, we can simply apply the similar tool to any geometry. This layer create much more detail including multiple silk shape between synapse shapes. We finish this layer with dense particle scattered on top of it, to make sure we can apply the same material from the following figure. The most interesting part of this layer is that we are using the CHOP network to create some heart beat motion and apply it to some part. We can read the speed from animation cache so that we can create more aggressive heart beat.
For the final layer, we use a really rough smoke simulation, to advect the particle sim. To break the dot shape from the particle sim, we use a tool called "netting" to make the dot shape become more like liquid shape. This is just a simple SOP tool similar to the "surface tension" in DOP. We search for the average position inside the search area, and make all points move to those average position. This create the sharpen look. After all, lighters pick up the caches of particles and applied with their unique material.
All these images are captured from the Cinefex 150. This page is not for public use. Only for those people or company who received password directly from me, Jonny. DO NOT download, copy, or share any material from this page.