An interview with CIS vfx supervisor Randy Goux discusses some of the work behind the movie ‘RED’. I particularly like the discussion around the popular trailer scene where they stop an RPG with a well-placed bullet to the tip. Explosions are a dime a dozen in VFX, but the slow-motion closeup of the exploding tip presenting some new challenges.
fxg: How did you bend the metal like that?
Goux: We actually used Maya’s cloth simulation. It’s weird telling people we bent metal that way, but it’s basically the dynamics module in Maya we’re using. We modelled the RPG, set it up as a cloth object and then you can define its tearing properties. You can have it tear like a paper bag or sheet metal or you can give it whatever threshold you like for the simulation. The sims went back and forth on how tense that metal was and how much we would reveal as the fireballs come out. There was also some fluid dynamics going on in the inner core, basically fire effects that curl around the ‘cloth’ objects. We also had to define how much mass the bullet going in had and how that correlated with the RPG. We pushed it a little further by animating a few hero pieces coming out towards the camera. The bulk of it was a dynamic simulation where you let the software do its course, but then we augmented that with some hero pieces animated in Maya and also in Nuke.
via fxguide – after effects:flame:nuke – R.E.D CIS Vancouver goes Badass.
