I Remade Iron Man VFX With 20 #vfx #digital #digitaleffect #ironman

This is a shot in Iron Man, a movie created by 500 VFX artists over a one-year period with a budget of 140 million dollars. And I'm gonna recreate it with a budget of 20 dollars in one week to see if I can become the next Iron Man. When Iron Man came out 16 years ago, it started the Marvel Universe we know and sometimes love. There's one scene that I'm sure we all remember well. The perfect sales pitch for the mass-destructive weapon Jericho that ends with this incredible shot. I've always wanted to recreate this shot, but since I don't live anywhere close to a desert and of course managed to forget the launch codes to my missiles, I knew I had to get creative. I found a mountain I wanted to shoot on, but I didn't feel like walking for hours, so I decided to try and drive up the trail instead. I was quickly met with the fences, but they were no match for my girlfriend. Eventually though, I realized it was time to maybe start walking. After about an hour, I was met with stunning views, and even better, a long flat ground with hills in the background just like the movie. I set up the camera and quickly shot the video while the sun was out, and here are the three clips I ended up with. I decided to not recreate it shot by shot because that would mean double the VFX work, so instead I decided to shoot three shots. One for the missile launch, one in the air, and of course the money shot itself. With our shots ready and back home in a more comfortable environment, I got to work. I wanted to start with the hardest shot, so I got to work making an explosion, and my software of choice for this is Houdini, or according to my girlfriend, my other girlfriend. And if you're not familiar with Houdini, it's the simulation king of 3D, but I just use it for everything because I'm too lazy to learn another 3D software. Anyways, making an explosion in Houdini is both super easy and super hard at the same time. You can hit the explosion button, but that will give you this abomination. So instead, we're gonna create it from scratch. You might remember from school that fire requires oxygen, heat, and fuel, and the same is true in Houdini. It's trying its best to replicate real life to create effects that look like real life. So let's feed fuel, heat, and oxygen into our sim. Well, technically oxygen is always present in a Houdini simulation, and heat is called temperature and fuel flame, but that's not super important. And with this, we actually get fire. In order to turn this into an explosion, again, let's look to real life and shoot the fuel outwards. This will aerate it and ignite it all at once, giving us an explosion. So let's do this in Houdini by creating these particles shooting outwards, and then converting them to fuel and heat for the simulation. Now, there's of course a lot of tweaking involved to get it to look exactly how you want, but eventually I got a result I was happy with. So with an explosion created, and clearly a lot of compositing work in front of me, my next task was to create 24 more, which really isn't that hard in Houdini. I just choose where I want each explosion to happen, randomize some values like the speed, size, direction, and forces, and suddenly I have a whole row of explosions. Awesome. Next, let's do the missiles. I draw a curve from each exploding point into the air and add some noise to it. I then use a card node to animate these missiles I found online along it. Next, I create a simple thruster fire using similar techniques to the explosion, and add that to the missiles. Finally, I did a smoke simulation for the missiles, but this ended up being a bit too heavy for my machine, so I split it up into two simulations. All I had left now was the shockwave, which ended up being a bit more frustrating than I'd anticipated. I created a growth solver and timed this up with the Iron Man reference. Next, I emitted particles from the edge of this growth shooting forwards, and turned that into smoke that I fed into the smoke simulation. I then simulated this, but could not get it to look right. I went through a lot of iterations and probably spent a whole day on this alone. Eventually though, I managed to get something I was happy enough with by continually tweaking the simulation values. I also made sure to split this into four simulations, depending on how close they were to the camera, so I could simulate everything at the highest possible quality. This visualization also happened to look quite cool for some reason. With everything finally ready, I rendered it all out in a few different passes, and here's what the raw renders look like on top of the footage. We'll do the compositing for this in a second, but first, let's do the other shots. Again, let's do the harder of the two, which is this shot in the air of the missile splitting up into 24 smaller missiles that take off towards the ground. Like most aerial shots, it was easy to 3D track since there wasn't much movement. I'm horrible at animating, so instead of animating the missiles flying past the camera and falling down, I decided to simulate it. This will also give me the most accurate result, so I set up the simulation and made sure to keep gravity off until I wanted it to fall, which gave me a result I was happy with. Next, I cut some holes in the missile and filled it with smaller missiles. I then simulated the surface of the missile blowing off, and I added extra air resistance to this simulation so they would fly towards the camera. After, I simulated the smaller missiles shooting out of the big missile, and created a custom force that would propel them forwards in the direction they are facing that turns on midway through the sim. I could then turn on the thrusters I created earlier at the same time, so it looks like they are causing it. Lastly, I added smoke trails behind all the missiles, and rendered this shot out in a few different passes as well. Okay, one more shot. This one is pretty straightforward, it's just the missiles shooting out of its launcher. I found this model online that's perfect. Next, I dropped it into my scene and positioned it where I wanted it. I animated one of the missiles to take off, and simulated the smoke for it. I thought the textures looked a bit plain and plasticky, so I used this roughness texture to add some details to the shader. Lastly, I created some grass that I rendered as a matte to blend the model in with the footage. I also used this grass as my shadow catcher, which was the final step for the 3D portion of this shot. Now, let's move on to compositing. For those of you who don't know, compositing is the process of adding our renders to our footage, and making them match as closely as we can. Currently, this is how our main shot looks without doing any compositing. I start by splitting the explosion into different layers, and then make the fire portion more red, and add some glow. I then make the smoke brighter, and use a few different noises to add some color to it. This is a great way to make your explosions look more realistic, because in real life, smoke is rarely just one color. I did some minor tweaks to the missiles and trails, but noticed an unsatisfying lack of missiles in the middle, so I copied one of the other ones and moved it into position. The explosions alone felt a bit too clean, and this is where the $20 comes in. I bought some dust explosion assets to add some variation and realism to the shot. I placed them in various locations, and made sure to put some in between the explosions as well to blend them in better. I then faked the sun lighting by making the left side darker than the right, and added some light from the explosions. In the movie, we see these three giant dirt explosions right before the shockwave hits the camera. And not wanting to be outdone by Tony, I created five giant dirt blasts by just scaling up the assets. Something wasn't looking quite right, so I took a look at the black levels and noticed mine were too dark, so I lifted everything slightly to make it fit better. For the shockwave, I made it more and more visible as it got closer to camera, and used the ending of this shockwave asset to make sure the camera was fully covered by the shockwave. I also graded this no asset black to look as if some ash was mixed into the shockwave as well. I couldn't quite get the camera shake to look right, so I just tracked the camera shake from the movie and applied that to my shot. I then rotoed myself, added some lens dirt grain and camera shake, and the shot was done. I'm not gonna bore you with the compositing of the other two shots, cause they were done in a similar way, so let's just timelapse them and approve them as well. To finish the sequence, I did a quick grade in DaVinci to make the VFX pop. And if you're interested in learning VFX yourself, I've actually just made a beginner course teaching Houdini by making an explosion using the exact same methods I used in this video. I'll have that link below, and maybe you'll find a promo code there too. Now, enjoy the final video, and after, I'll show it side by side with the Iron Man sequence. To peace!