War Thunder cinematic and Houdini Clouds.

Сinematic for the game War Thunder, which we have been working just came out. I want to share the video itself and tell what I did in it. In search of a new interesting work, we asked to Gaijin Entertainment (one of the leaders in online games) with a proposal to cooperate. We proposed to make a video different from most other cinematics for games with live actors and scenery, they agreed.

This was a serious challenge for the whole team, as the main profile of our work is only Post Production and had little to do with real film production, but we decided to take a chance. Film UA Film Studio helped cast the actors and provided us resources for the realization of what we planned. Based on the experience gained in the supervision process of visual effects on stage and in-depth training with all participants in the process, we managed and fulfilled our goals. Only a month of preparation, several days of shooting and all the necessary materials were received and studio started to work.

I managed to participate in almost all stages of production, and of course, most of the time I spent on my main occupation - post-production. The main tasks that I had to do on this project: creating the necessary tools for work, Shading, Lighting and of course Cloud FX, because I was responsible for creating the whole scene of the air battle. I want to talk about clouds in a little more detail, but first, the result of the work of our team:

In cinematic was a huge scene of air battle, according to the director, everything should pass over a dense clouds. I started to solve this problem. Previously, I had to make clouds for other projects, but I still did not get such a volume. Our studio works in Houdini, which is ideal for creating automated solutions to almost any task in the production of visual effects. Well, I just love Houdini and use it every day.

Actually, in the search for information, I found many useful resources. Here are some of them:

• http://forums.odforce.net/topic/12923-pyroclastic-noise-demystified
• http://library.imageworks.com/pdfs/imageworks-library-Volumetric-Methods-In-Visual-Effects.pdf
• http://library.imageworks.com/pdfs/imageworks-library-Production-Volume-Rendering-Fundamentals.pdf
• http://library.imageworks.com/pdfs/imageworks-library-Production-Volume-Rendering-Systems.pdf
• http://evasion.imag.fr/~Antoine.Bouthors/research/phd/thesis/thesis.pdf
• And my favorite site: http://www.atoptics.co.uk

I prepared with basic blank models, which I processed with an Asset modifying shape and added various noise. I showed the result in a short making-off, I tried to show the tools from which shots was created:

That’s actually all I wanted to write, if you have questions, write to e-mail.