Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
elementFX, Marin County | FX Lead
In late 2008 I got to work on my first proper 'Hollywood' film that had some name recognition. Thanks to elementFX founder Marjolaine Tremblay who brought me on, she entrusted me with sorting out the iconic steam/smoke reaction that happens when vampires expose their skin to sunlight. As a deep generalist at that time, FX setups were part of my monthly routine working on commercials and game cinematics, and I relished diving into something so fun.
Maya FluidFX was around at this time and had 2D and 3D containers so naturally I wanted to do this all in 3D as the camera angles and dynamic nature of the shots would need depth believability. But after a few weeks of RnD I faced that fact that I simply could not get the voxel detail at the level needed for whispy looking smoke trails, and even if i could computing it all would be impossible in the time frame needed with the current state of the art hardware and render farm. So I ended up doing a 2.5D solution where I had a 2D container in 3D space, with a 3D polygonal emitter that was created by tracking the sunlight areas of the skin over time with a particle emission to geo plugin. Once this was all working elementFX hired on a few fx artists to pump out shots and thus i became a 'lead'. Overall it generally works, and with a lot of quick shots we were able to get away with a certain amount of iffy situations. I would love however to re-do this in Houdini to see how much easier things have gotten in the last 15 years : )
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