Hector Ortiz FX TD Demo Reel - January 30, 2020

Directed smoke through vector fields shaped as Hawaiian
waves constructed from particles systems advected through a static vector field that was
customly shaped to look a like a wave. A viscosity scalar field was advected through the initial
sim to be used later to transform volumes to a solid surface. This field was constructed based
on cooling temperature. Several pyro simulations were combined for the extra smoke emitted
from the wall.

Created Leg Virus with different SOP solvers.

Created multi-cluster wire simulation foliage interaction with Okja creation effect of hundreds of
plants. Responsible for layout, cleanup and proper simulation with collisions.

I was responsible for the look and dynamics of all CG fire in The Huntsman. I utilized a multicluster
pyro setup. It was designed to be choreographed by supervisors. It included art
direction on the spread. It was rendered in Clarisse as VDBs.

Originally a bigger Rigid Body simulation that became a non-dynamic solution in SOPs where
an attribute was transferred from the shards on to the ground. The attribute would allow the
reveal of cracks created by using the poly extrude node. Generated volumetric dry ice smoke
from the tip of the shard’s leading edge. Created a mask for transitioning from grass to frozen
ground by rendering from the top the crystallizing space colonizing tool.

See above. Created pyro fire simulations.

Generated a low resolution pyro simulation at the origin. Transferred motion using the inverse
velocity of a point on the arrow and used it as the direction of a wind force. Meshed low
resolution pyro simulation. Created a custom shader which mixed data from the simulation with
polygonal attributes. Advected particles to use life attribute as ramp for core brightnesses.

Generated smoke simulations by animating spheres and toruses.
- First shot
- The first shot used four pyro clusters.
- It also has instanced pebbles.
- I used the point replicate tools to generate more points at render time.
- Used lighting bolt setup.
- Second Shot
- Created shield effects using a polygonal surface that grows and has a
ripple effect on it.
- Third Shot
- Generated dust off two traveling spheres. Again, spheres drive the main
motion of the smoke which allows for better swirling detail as the volumes
travels; not stretched by vector field.
- Generated snow from trees in the second shot too.

Ground Eruption: I created a dusty pyro simulation with a light inside of it to make it look
explosive. Also generated a particle system with instanced rock geometry and dirt created
similarly to the Happy Feet 2 snow.
Repulsor Beam: Utilized setup with different volumetric patterns combined with a pyro curling
smoke. The rest was enhanced in comp to look illuminated and hot

I was responsible for researching, developing and the delivery of a sequence of shots requiring
Rigid Body Dynamic Bullet coins inside a treasure chest. Each shot started with a grid
hand-animated by an animator. Created a RBD point object setup using coins and jewels geometry.

Used pyro solver to generate dust from goblins.

Responsible for generating interactive RBD pebbles simulations on inclined surface for almost
all shots in cliff sequence. Procedurally modeled and textured rocks.

Created a high resolution dust simulation added to the plate dust to make it appear as if one of
the Subultrons interacted with the dust.

Created RBD pebbles.

Dust - the trick with all the dust in this movie was having enough force followed with enough
drag to get the right puff feeling. Therefore, its motion should dampen and dissipate quickly.

Create particle impact snow effect.

Used Houdini’s cloud setup as source. Again, the actual cloud is moved and not pushed
through a vector field as to avoid losing swirling detail in the simulation. On the last shot, a
vector field was needed to suck the fart cloud as it comes close to the vent.

Created foliage interaction.

Created interactive splashes with CG animals and water ocean surfaces. These were created
utilizing the same technique similar to the one used on the snow on Happy Feet 2 with the
different applications of noise. The particles were then meshed using the particle fluid surfacers
and a water ocean surface shader was applied to it.

Created water spout. This shot seemed to have traveled quite a bit between artists until it arrived to me. Initially,
many of us were using pyro simulations to get it done. However, I came up with a simpler
solution that better matched our reference. I simply created an isosurface made out of spheres
copied to an animated spline with subtle animated noise. Then I applied a standard Lambertian
shader on it.

Created snow wisps using SOPs and pyro. Created a system that converts ground geometry into a vector field which mixes tangent vector
via the cross product of the normals and another vector lying in the same plane as the normal.
Within DOPs, after bringing in the tangent geometry and converting it to velocity information, the
swirling velocity from the fluid is mixed with the directional/tangent velocity provided by the
ground geometry. The velocities were mixed by extracting its unit vector, mixing and then
multiplying it back with the original velocity’s magnitude.

Generated snow simulation with 3-step noise. Instanced rock geometry. Rendered about 1
million particles that were then multiplied by the custom point replicator. Also, incorporated
volumes for the very fine snow.

Soul Bullets: Used setup which creates a line from gun to Deado’s head. A bullet is slid down
the line. Enough spacing needed to exist between trails as not to make it show gaps. From the
bullet, particles are emitted with curl noise
Deado Deaths: Generated an explosion of particles which combine inherit velocity from the
Deado creature, outward velocity for the explosive behavior produced from the point normals of
the character and curl noise for the final look. This effect was composed of the head explosion,
the body explosion and the flying ashes.

Animated slobber on Rhino’s ball using regular particles surfaced with Houdini’s particle fluid
surfacer. The slobber effect is composed of a slobber trail left by the ball, the slobber on the
ball and flying off the ball.

Created the illusion of water bubbles using Houdini and Renderman in Maya. Drag was colored
red and gravity green to better control and portray the feel of air released through the water.

Created RBD fracture effect. Created voronoi RBD fracturing setup. A play with drag and other forces was done to achieve
the right timing. Particle based chunks, bubbles and a hero chunk were added as requested by
the Visual Effects Supervisor.