Dev Blog : FX in Martha Is Dead – Part 4 – Fluids
Hello again folks, it's time for our final blog entry looking at the work behind some of the VFX in Martha Is Dead!
This week we are keeping it with fluids again, but thankfully - a little less morbid than just blood.
We'll be talking about the systems in place to help generate the important weather effects, and how to get that fluid in the dark room sloshing around *Just right*
Settle yourself down and get the kettle on, enjoy!
For the previous examples I had started from Emitters, but as different example, for the development tanks seen within the Photography Darkroom I had to start with containers already full of liquid. I took the model of the photograph (That the player produces from the camera) which was a simple plane, created the thickness to make it collide well with Houdini's particles and attached its animation to it.
By exporting everything as alembic, it kept the cache and I therefore limited myself to "soaking" the model of the photograph in the liquid. Here too, like the gushing of the blood the effect was exaggerated. The model in the photo plunged into the liquid that created full on tsunamis rather than generating small settling waves (To imagine the scene just think of putting fruit in the blender but forgetting to put the lid on. Fruit goes everywhere!). With some adjustments to the parameters it improved a lot.
For this animation I made two caches, one of the sheet that enters the water, the other of the sheet that comes out. To do this, it was necessary to create a frame in which the two animations were perfectly identical to be able to swap them at the right moment.
All the dynamic exports made in Houdini are extremely optimized alembics so performance isn’t impacted.
For my very last example, let’s talk about rain! This is an effect that always works very well but is not particularly difficult to achieve, but I couldn't make simple rain of water, we wanted it with blood!
The procedure of creating rain is very simple: a system is created that allows the spawn of particles in a well-defined area (shape and size to your liking). You move the spawn pretty high and make it product lot of particles - more or less depending on the size of your emitter (And GPU requirements). A gravity knot is attached to it and we adjust the shape, size and colour of the drops and that's it, it's raining!
Based on our needs however, this wasn’t enough, we had to create a sequencer in which the camera framed from above and reached the ground. In Niagara I added an extra system, that generates very fast splashes on the ground to simulate the small drops that are created when the largest raindrop hits a surface. I created a plane, folded it into a cylinder with a transparent material that made it look like a splash of water at the edge of its parabola, then I animated its scale on the Z axis based on the duration of its life to simulate a wave animation. At the beginning of its spawn the particle measured zero on its Z scale, in the middle of its life it measured one and eventually returned to zero. Animating its opacity, the effect wasn’t bad.
In order to have as few particles as possible on the screen, I made sure that the drops were eliminated as soon as they hit the ground. If I wanted to create the "splash" exactly in the point where the drop falls I could have done it using a "death event ". A "death event" is an event that, once the rain particle was extinguished, it would send the data of its position and the moment in which the event happened to the splash system, allowing it to create the splash in the right place.
In our case this wasn’t necessary because it rains so much that you could not feel how often and where the drops were falling.
And with that, we conclude our dive into the magic that goes on behind the curtain of some of Martha Is Deads VFX!
We hope you've enjoyed learning a little about how some of the stunning visuals in the game are put together, and the team at LKA have most definitely got more than a few more surprises in store for you...
We'll be sharing a new set of blogs with you very soon as we speed towards February 24th - so sit tight!
In the meantime, if you want to catch more Martha content across the internet, then hit the links at the bottom of the blog! And as always, make sure Martha is on your wishlists - and tell your friends!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/515960/Martha_Is_Dead/
Wired Facebook | Wired Twitter | Wired Youtube | Wired Discord | Wired Instagram | Wired Twitch | Wired Reddit | Wired Imgur
This week we are keeping it with fluids again, but thankfully - a little less morbid than just blood.
We'll be talking about the systems in place to help generate the important weather effects, and how to get that fluid in the dark room sloshing around *Just right*
Settle yourself down and get the kettle on, enjoy!
For the previous examples I had started from Emitters, but as different example, for the development tanks seen within the Photography Darkroom I had to start with containers already full of liquid. I took the model of the photograph (That the player produces from the camera) which was a simple plane, created the thickness to make it collide well with Houdini's particles and attached its animation to it.
By exporting everything as alembic, it kept the cache and I therefore limited myself to "soaking" the model of the photograph in the liquid. Here too, like the gushing of the blood the effect was exaggerated. The model in the photo plunged into the liquid that created full on tsunamis rather than generating small settling waves (To imagine the scene just think of putting fruit in the blender but forgetting to put the lid on. Fruit goes everywhere!). With some adjustments to the parameters it improved a lot.
For this animation I made two caches, one of the sheet that enters the water, the other of the sheet that comes out. To do this, it was necessary to create a frame in which the two animations were perfectly identical to be able to swap them at the right moment.
All the dynamic exports made in Houdini are extremely optimized alembics so performance isn’t impacted.
For my very last example, let’s talk about rain! This is an effect that always works very well but is not particularly difficult to achieve, but I couldn't make simple rain of water, we wanted it with blood!
The procedure of creating rain is very simple: a system is created that allows the spawn of particles in a well-defined area (shape and size to your liking). You move the spawn pretty high and make it product lot of particles - more or less depending on the size of your emitter (And GPU requirements). A gravity knot is attached to it and we adjust the shape, size and colour of the drops and that's it, it's raining!
Based on our needs however, this wasn’t enough, we had to create a sequencer in which the camera framed from above and reached the ground. In Niagara I added an extra system, that generates very fast splashes on the ground to simulate the small drops that are created when the largest raindrop hits a surface. I created a plane, folded it into a cylinder with a transparent material that made it look like a splash of water at the edge of its parabola, then I animated its scale on the Z axis based on the duration of its life to simulate a wave animation. At the beginning of its spawn the particle measured zero on its Z scale, in the middle of its life it measured one and eventually returned to zero. Animating its opacity, the effect wasn’t bad.
In order to have as few particles as possible on the screen, I made sure that the drops were eliminated as soon as they hit the ground. If I wanted to create the "splash" exactly in the point where the drop falls I could have done it using a "death event ". A "death event" is an event that, once the rain particle was extinguished, it would send the data of its position and the moment in which the event happened to the splash system, allowing it to create the splash in the right place.
In our case this wasn’t necessary because it rains so much that you could not feel how often and where the drops were falling.
And with that, we conclude our dive into the magic that goes on behind the curtain of some of Martha Is Deads VFX!
We hope you've enjoyed learning a little about how some of the stunning visuals in the game are put together, and the team at LKA have most definitely got more than a few more surprises in store for you...
We'll be sharing a new set of blogs with you very soon as we speed towards February 24th - so sit tight!
In the meantime, if you want to catch more Martha content across the internet, then hit the links at the bottom of the blog! And as always, make sure Martha is on your wishlists - and tell your friends!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/515960/Martha_Is_Dead/
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