Topic：Utopia And Dystopia
Project Name：Double World
Research-007
Brain Melt Effect：
This effect was added midway through the production. My team member told me that our sequence was looking a bit monotonous during the production process and we were worried that the final rendering would be too plain, so we were wondering if we needed to add something. So I thought I could add a melt effect at the end of the scene to make the brain melt, based on the subject of our project: the brain. Because our brain is made of metal. If we could make the metal brain bleed red blood. Not only would it be visually striking, but it would also fit in with the idea of adding some cyberpunk elements.
For this effect I chose to use Houdini to create it. Houdini is a very good choice for this type of effect because it doesn’t have to be composited in maya, it can be rendered and composited in nuke. The effect is mainly created using Houdini’s popnet. I didn’t do very high precision particle calculations on the model as we had limited time and our style of cel shading was too realistic and the elements didn’t really match the image.
To make the effect of a metal brain oozing blood. I tried to apply the material directly in Houdini, but it was not very successful. So I chose to export two different colours and then composite the two sequences.