Scarlet Witch VFX Recreation: the Journey Begins

So, here I am with my first post on this blog. For the most part, this blog will consist of works in progress and updates on the current projects I’m working on—my main project at the moment being my independent study in VFX. I took my first VFX class last semester and worked with Houdini for the first time, and to my surprise, it actually wasn’t a terrible experience. Though it was quite intimidating at first, I quickly found myself growing quite fond of Houdini as a program with its node-based workspace, especially compared to previous programs I have had to work in (*cough cough* Maya and Blender *cough cough* I still get flashbacks sometimes of watching Maya crash for absolutely no reason right in front of my eyes, accelerating my slow descent into insanity… never again).

After continued work in Houdini, I also soon found that I was enjoying learning how to create VFX that could mimic ones I’ve seen in film or games, even though it wasn’t even a part of the industry I had considered delving into before. Soon enough, the end of the semester was approaching, and I realized that there weren’t really any other VFX classes offered by my university to continue expanding on the techniques I had been learning. But, just when I thought all hope was lost and my pursuit of VFX work would have to be abandoned, my professor announced to the class that he was interested in taking some students for an independent study for the upcoming spring semester.

So, after much debate with myself, I decided to conquer my fear and hesitancy and approach him about signing up for said independent study to continue my pursuit of learning Houdini and creating VFX. One very long and needlessly difficult application period later, my independent study was approved, and I am now beginning my continued exploration of creating VFX in Houdini for this semester.

One thing I knew I wanted to learn whenever I signed up for this independent study was how to create magical power effects, used in both movies and game cinematics alike. In my previous semester, I learned how to create many practical and realistic effects, but I couldn’t deny my curiosity about creating effects based more in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, and how exactly it would be similar or different to the techniques I had already learned. After telling my professor this, he encouraged me to find a reference clip from an established piece of media, either film or TV show, that I could study to learn how to create my own magical VFX. I ended up settling on Marvel’s Scarlet Witch, one of my long-time favorite superheroes, and one that I think has always had very intriguing-looking magic powers on screen. Specifically, I decided to use this clip from the Disney+ series WandaVision, where Wanda confronts Monica about how she’s not exactly supposed to be in Wanda’s perfect reality:

Disney please do not sue me this is solely for educational purposes, I do not own any of the content in this video.

The first step in my pursuit to recreate the Scarlet Witch’s powers was to take some screenshots of my reference video and do a comprehensive FX breakdown. Through this breakdown, my goal was to break up each part of her powers into pieces that I would need to create and then put together in Houdini, so that I’d have a better idea of where to start on this project. You can see my short but sweet breakdown below:

Keeping all these notes in mind, I started to think about what kind of potential strategies I could apply for approaching this effect, doing my best to apply my limited knowledge of VFX to this new beast in front of me. Thinking back to projects I had worked on last semester, an idea came to mind that the tendrils branching off of the main orb could possibly be created like the electricity FX I had worked with before. Along with this, I realized that the main shape of the orb and the swirling energy within it could be created using a particle system, similarly to a sparks effect I had worked to create for a previous project. This particle system would need an emitter that would push the particles outwards intermittently to create the pulsating effect from my reference video, though the movement of these particles is where things seem to get tricky. I want them to be very fluid and flowy in their movement even though it is quick, rather than the short and more sharp bursts of sparks I’ve created. Additionally, regarding the shape of the energy itself within the orb, I need to figure out how to create the branching tendrils that are seen throughout the Scarlet Witch’s magic. Rather than just standalone strands, all of the tendrils of energy need to sort of meld together into one big mass, which is where my current knowledge of creating FX falls short—so that’s certainly an area I will be researching very soon.

Other than those main points about creating the meat of the effect, I also had the idea that a fog cloud could be used to create the sort of aura that can be faintly seen around the magic orb, since it is much fainter and essentially acts as one mass encompassing the energy tendrils. The fog could also help to enhance the point lights that will likely need to be added to intensify the light emitted from the orb: one for the orb as a whole that would be a bright red, and one that would be bright yellow for the inner core.

So, not only am I going to be applying my previous knowledge of creating VFX in Houdini and learning how to utilize new techniques in tandem to create this effect—no, no, my ambition doesn’t end there. Along with this, I am also going to be dipping my toes into the world of rigging and animation. Somehow in my 2 and a half years at college, I have managed to avoid touching the task of actually animating 3D models, aside from one required class I took during my freshman year.

Even for my previous VFX projects, I have mostly worked with static 3D objects, with the VFX being the only thing in the scene actually moving in complex ways. But, for this project, I realized when discussing with my professor that it would likely enhance my end product if I could create a simple hand movement on a base model to mimic Wanda’s hand and arm in my reference clip. Surely a movement so simple couldn’t be that hard, right? After some encouragement from my professor, he armed me with some educational clips on how to export model files from blender to then be used in Houdini, and also gave me some resources to figure out how to animate said models.

This is something that is still quite intimidating to me to this day, so figuring that whole animation situation out has mostly distracted me from the potentially more difficult obstacle of learning new techniques in Houdini to be able to properly recreate a production-quality effect. As you can probably tell, everything about this independent study is slowly but surely pushing me out of my comfort zone, and forcing me to learn about things that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have had the initiative to do on my own. I’m very grateful to be able to have these opportunities to grow as a student, but the scope of things does definitely scare me sometimes, and makes me question if I actually will be able to come out on the other side with an end product I’m satisfied with.

That being said, I know there isn’t much use in worrying about it now, since everything is bound to seem scary when it’s all new and unknown, but I hope to be able to slowly crack away at the things I don’t know so that I feel better prepared to actually hold a job in this field—or something similar to it at least. That’s my cautiously optimistic take for the end of my post for this week, hopefully next week can continue that theme!