Scarlet Witch VFX Recreation: Inspiration and Improvement

It’s hard not to feel like I’m repeating myself with these blog posts at times, but hey, that’s just the nature of the creative workflow sometimes. I find that it’s often the smallest details that are easiest to get stuck on, and that’s pretty much what my work on this VFX project has been for the past couple weeks. Not without good reason though, I’d like to point out—I believe the entire look and feel of this effect relies on the main body of the magic: the outer orb. Coincidentally, that’s the one thing that still has felt off even after many minute adjustments. I’ve tried my best to be optimistic for my past couple blog posts, but I believe it’s safe to say that my improvements have been relatively minor when it came to really making a breakthrough in getting that contrast I’m aiming for with the outer orb particles and making it less smoky overall.

After a decent time of working on the same aspect of this project, I’ve found it’s very easy to lose motivation and be at a loss of what to do, and I think that’s something that comes with any artistic project. But, that’s where the age-old remedy of looking for inspiration comes from! This week, I was really wanting a new perspective on this project and the opportunity to try out some different techniques in Houdini to make bigger improvements in my work. Seemingly just in time, my supervising professor pointed me towards the EraVFX YouTube channel to take a look at their work. Surprisingly enough, EraVFX is actually a VFX artist who worked on WandaVision and also happened to have posted a brief tutorial on how to create Wanda’s magic FX in Houdini. As I’m sure you can imagine, this was quite exciting for me!

I’ve definitely appreciated the creators and tutorials I’ve been able to follow and gain knowledge from in the past, but it’s even nicer to learn from an artist who worked in proximity to the actual effect I’m trying to create, and put out a tutorial for said effect as well.

Going through EraVFX’s videos on the Scarlet Witch magic, I was able to see a new perspective on how to approach my work both by sitting and watching the videos and also by trying them out myself in my own project. I ended up trying out a couple alternate methods for adjusting the outer orb, eventually settling on a kind of in-between method comprised of EraVFX’s techniques, my supervising professor Nelson Lim’s pointers, and my own base work on the particles.

Putting all this knowledge together landed me with this pretty nice looking base render of my outer orb particles, with notably better shaping and contrast than all of my previous attempts (or so I’d like to think, it’s hard for me to tell after staring at so many iterations for so long).

Armed with this new knowledge I used to improve my outer orb, I copied over some of the same nodes to my branching tendrils in order to further enhance the look of them as well. Once again, I was very satisfied with the outcome and the small but notable difference in the look of the tendrils.

The final thing I added for this week in Houdini was a brand new smoke simulation courtesy of EraVFX’s guidance. I do not have much experience with smoke, so most of the process was very new to me, but I was quite pleased with the end result that helped to provide a more volumetric feel to my magic. I had been attempting to create a similar effect simply by using glows and other methods in comp, but the smoke definitely was able to give me a much more dynamic shape along with more overall detail to enhance the rest of the effect. I hope to be able to finally figure out geo lights by next week so I can add some more dimension to the color of the smoke, since that’s the main thing it’s lacking at the moment.

After all the work in Houdini was said and done, I threw all my new assets into Nuke to comp them together and try out some new techniques there as well. I didn’t get to explore as much as I would have liked within Nuke this week, but I figured I shouldn’t spend too much time dwelling on comp until I’m fairly confident that my base work in Houdini is satisfactory.

And so I ended up with this finished render as my work in progress for this week:

Honestly can’t say anymore if I think this is better or not since I’m both mildly sleep deprived and have been looking at this for far too long, but it’s noticeably different than my previous work at the very least! We shall see what the verdict is after this week’s critique, that’s the real confirmation for me.