At long last, it’s the end of the semester and the finale of my senior capstone project recreating a VFX shot from Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness! As always, this final blog post is an in-depth breakdown of all the elements of the project and my final thoughts on this tumultuous journey.

Only a few more weeks remain and the pressure is on, my main focus being finishing up polishing existing elements and implementing the final element for this shot: debris.

With the end of the semester rapidly approaching, I decided to give my project an overall facelift, revisiting almost all of my previous elements and reorganizing my file to make my progress more efficient.

I’m back on the grind once again trying to make up for lost time and push my elements to the next level, this time implementing vellum grains for the falling dirt sim.

The last week before spring break definitely posed a challenge for me for this wip. It definitely didn’t help that I got stuck on fixing issues from previous weeks within my elements, but luckily I was able to problem solve about 90% of them, so I’m hoping to focus on creating more new elements when I return.

Lot’s of small fixes and progress forward for this week’s work in progress, slowly but surely refining elements and working towards the bigger and more complicated sims.

This week was a bit of a rude awakening to the amount of VEX coding I would need to do to achieve this effect… but in the end I can say I did in fact learn a lot this week and feel a bit better about my coding knowledge!

Finally, the time has come to start on Dr. Strange’s magic! This week was focused on starting to refine previous elements and setting up the base for the magic streams running through the stones.

Progress for this week was a bit slow due to life throwing some crazy things at me, but I still managed to make some progress and completely revamp the cobblestones, which are looking much better and more organic already.

It’s the first week of real work on my capstone project, which ended up being a bit of a (literally) rocky start to learning procedural modeling in Houdini.

The spring 2023 semester is upon us and I am once again starting a new VFX project, this time from Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness!

Check out the full breakdown of my project from the fall 2023 semester, a recreation of pyro VFX from HBO’s The Nevers.

The pyro VFX struggle continues as I revisit some of my existing elements and continue to iterate on them in every way I can think of, all in hopes of getting closer to my reference shot.

Houdini pyro simulations have battered and beaten me pretty hard this semester, but I still have some fight left in me! I have however, learned the hard way that trial and error is most certainly the theme of this project.

My pyro sim learning experience continues, this time slightly more optimistically as I start on other parts of the fire magic for my full shot.

The pyro sim struggle saga continues this week, finally with some hope on the horizon with some guidance from Nelson Lim.

My first experience learning pyro sims in Houdini definitely turned out to be a (literal) trial by fire.

I’ve returned from my brief break over the summer with another new VFX venture for this semester!

At long last, I’ve finally completed my Scarlet Witch VFX project! Join me as I recap my journey of learning to create magic VFX in Houdini and the many learning experiences that came with it.

You guessed it, more little adjustments this week as I slowly descend into the madness that is trying to nail the contrast and details of this effect.