The first half of this semester has truly flown by it seems, I can’t believe I’m a week away from calling this project finished! Similarly to last week, I don’t have a whole lot to show for this post, but I’m doing my best to add all the finishing touches to this shot so that I can really be satisfied with my end product.

As I mentioned before, this week was all about continuing to refine the base of the VFX I had created in past weeks, beginning with revisiting the core once again. Last week I definitely feel like I got closer to achieving the feeling of the core of the magic in my reference shot, but this week I wanted to zero in on the movement and shaping of the core so that I could finally call that part done. I went about it in a relatively rudimentary way— I simply animated a transform node over the sphere that my points were scattered on, and also keyframed some of the noise animations in order to get the particular form of the core right. This proved to be quite tedious, but it did definitely make a difference in the end to have keen attention to detail for these smaller portions of the effect.

After tackling the core and polishing it up in comp, I turned my attention back to the outer orb of the magic where all the tendrils were emitting from. I definitely was getting that stringy effect I wanted, though the specific look of the magic was still a bit too smokey for me. The biggest thing I wanted was for the orb to have more energy overall, and for the coloring to be less one dimensional. So, I went into the pop net of my particles and adjusted the drag and velocity some to give the movement of my particles some more speed, and I also went back into my material library to edit the material I had made for both the core and outer orb. I originally started with both of them being emitted by unlit surfaces, which worked fine for the time being, but I quickly realized that unlit surface was part of the reason why the coloring of the magic felt a little flat. I ended up switching both materials to MTLX standard surfaces instead, turning up the emission but also specifically leaving on the base color for the outer orb. This allowed the outer orb’s colors to be affected by the light emitted from the core, and helped to add some more variation in color when it came to that lighter red that is present throughout most of the Scarlet Witch’s magic.

Along with adjusting what I had already made for the outer orb, there was still an aspect missing that I had to add this week. If you look closely in the reference, you can see that along with the bulk of the orb being made up of semi closely packed tendrils, there are also some longer tendrils that branch out far past the perimeter of the main magic orb, really adding to the building explosive feeling of Wanda’s powers. In an attempt to save myself some time, I decided to start to create these branching tendrils by creating a copy of my outer orb and just adjusting some parameters. I messed with the noise pattern on my base geometry to make it much more sparse, since there are significantly less outer branching tendrils than there are in the main orb.

Following these relatively easy adjustments came my bright idea to add the pop attract node to my particle system, since I wanted to try and refine the way these branching tendrils moved with respect to the core and the rest of the outer orb. Now, I have never worked with this node before, so most of my troubleshooting with trying to get my desired effect just consisted of me turning up and down values of parameters until something looked right. I can’t say it was entirely efficient, but I did end up with a pretty satisfactory effect in the end!

Armed with newly refined effects to add back to my scene, I promptly wedged and rendered out everything to bring into Nuke. Of course, for some reason this week the wedging process was hardly as smooth as the first time, and I honestly cannot figure out why at the moment. Everything went off without a hitch last week, but this week as I was re-wedging my particles, I ran into an odd issue. Houdini would go through the wedging process and render out all the versions of the different frames in batches, but it would get maybe a third of the way through and seemingly get stuck buffering on one frame, and simply quit making progress. My temporary fix to this issue was to just create my wedges in smaller batches, though I hope to figure out a more satisfactory solution for the future. You can’t win ‘em all, right?

More than mildly inconveniencing technological issues aside, I am happy to report that everything else went off without a hitch when it came to my comp process for the week! I adjusted some more aspects of the scene along with integrating my new and improved VFX, bringing us to this product for my second to last week of work. It’s almost… a little too detailed now within the outer orb? Part of me wants to make the tendrils a bit less busy to really emphasize the bigger shape the orb is creating. And the branching tendrils definitely need some work, but the essence of it is there!

I am both slightly scared and very excited to be presenting my final product next week, it certainly has been a wild ride so far in my VFX journey with this independent study. I can only hope that my last week of work will be kind to me, and that Houdini will decide to work properly with me like the good reliable program it has been so far.