THE PROJECT.
Do not disturb the sleeping Balrog...
As a group project for the third year of the three-year CGI program, we wanted to try to push the kids with a short film that had many shots with FX. FX are the famous “Special Effects – Special Effects,” such as water, explosions, fire smoke, etc., and for these we use Houdini software, used in production studios.
In order to make the demon of shadow and flame from The Lord of the Rings, the Balrog, students first had to sculpt him in every single detail to make him look as if he were made of solidified rock and lava, using zbrush. Then they added an extra layer of detail using Mari software, used by professionals in the field, for textures and smaller details. Finally, the students, who specialized in FX, created the flames and smoke by calculating everything inside Houdini. Hundreds of gigabytes of data to get a realistic and cinematic rendering.
CROWD SIM
The Crowd Sim, is the simulation of crowds/exercises. In the short film there are scenes where an army of goblins surrounds the ring company, and later flee upon hearing the arrival of the fire demon. This was a real test for the third graders, who for the first time tried their hand at developing animations for an entire army. All of this again thanks to the Houdini software.
COMPOSITING
For the final rendering of images, the last step is what is known as Compositing. This is the process where you put together all the rendering layers, such as lights, shadows, background, characters and effects. As in photoshop, frame sequences are retouched, edited and enhanced.
We had Andrea Geremia (one of our Top Trainers) as the main Supervisor for compositing on this project, and he allowed us to understand and learn all the techniques that are used in the film industry, all using the same software as the professionals: Nuke.
