Exploding Vampires?

[Digital_red]

Does anyone remeber the video file FE_int.avi on the Lightwave 6.5 Cd? In it Brian J Belvins from Flat Earth describes some of the effects shots they did for Blade.

“First we match moved the skeleton falling in the movement of the actor, over the skeleton we built a burned up ash layer that got revealed. Over that would be the Skin and the clothes layer”
My question(s) is how do you progressively reveal an object the way they did? It seems to burn from the centre outwards.
Is the reveal done in post?
Can you make an object dissolve from the centre outward or visa versa?

Anyone ever here ever done an Exploding Vamp?

Is it now too cliché?

[Ben_Chapé]

hi ,

i've done such a kind of effect once, u can spend a lot of time working on several layers.

As its not just a cg effect, 70% of the effect final look will be determined by the quality of the compositing work .

you will need a background, a character (cg or real), the skeleton matching the char movement, and all the extra layers (lots of particles, dust, internal organs, fluids ...)

I used some various disolving black&white animated mapping.
(you can use the transparency channel, the clip map object property, or even a matte object).
Problem is mainly to set a cool way to spread the effect (i used weight maps/ramps/uv ). So you can do whatever u imagine for the direction & behaviour of the disolve part.

for the 'Is it now too cliché?' part, as the effect is widely use on all vampire movies & shows like blade, buffy, ... maybe people have seen too much the fx, duno.
Maybe it's a good reason for including your own modification to the process :)

Good luck

[Digital_red]

Hey Thanks Ben,

Any chance you could post some pics/vid of your finished result?

"Problem is mainly to set a cool way to spread the effect"
That’s the bit I’m having problems with. I’ve tried procedurals with a spherical falloff and animated clip map. The results aren’t quite as good as I hoped.

Next I thing Ill try is to export a flattened uvmap. Bring it into AfterFX and reanimate the black&white clip map to match.

Id love to know how they did it in blade.

[Epita]

not wanting to, but i know that the team that did blade 2, used hodini to maximum effect when doing the dissintigrations of the new vamps. I dont know how they did it though. Are you going to an 18 type blood guts everywhere or the 12 buffy style turn to dust effect?

Epita

[Digital_red]

I read a few articles in 3D world mag about Blade2. It was Framestore CFC who did the "ash carbon" death scenes. They used a combination of Maya, Houdini and RenderMan. All of which are way out of my price range.

I was hopeing for a LW/after effects only solution. Perhaps Flat Earth used some proprietary plugin for the disintegration in LW.

If anyone has got the LW6.5 cd's have a look at the FE_int.avi and let me know what you think.

Epita: Its for my Effects/3d showreel so I dont want it too gruesome. Ill have to record some of the dust effects in buffy to see how they are done.

I keep trying some of the ideas ive had and see how things turn out.:)

Hopefully post some results soon.