FXPHD – VFX304 – Explosive Pyro Action Sequences with RenderMan

Pixar’s RenderMan, Autodesk Maya, Side FX Houdini and The Foundry Nuke X will be used in this high end 3D Lighting and Stereoscopic Deep Compositing course to complete a final feature film quality VFX shot. The course will feature an exploding highly detailed War Rig Truck Explosion (inspired by the Mad Max: Fury Road Film) which has been specially made by fxphd. This course will take completed Houdini PyroFX Simulation scenes from course HOU215 and turn them into a finished film quality VFX shot with a focus on photo-real lighting and compositing.

For any Nuke Compositor, 3D Lighting Artist or 3D Generalist, this course will show how to finish a highly detailed and complex VFX destruction shot using the latest high end film post production software. Techniques including interactive lighting using Pixar’s RIS, lighting Pyro FX in Mantra, Deep Compositing and Stereoscopic workflows in Nuke X will all be covered in this course. The software packages used will include Side FX Houdini and Autodesk Maya which are high end software for FX simulation and 3D animation. This is an intermediate to advanced course and students are given access to full versions of all software used in the course via the fxphd VPN. All the 3D scene files, 3D rendered layers, stock footage and deep rendered files will be available to all students to complete the course.

The course is taught by Liam Whitehouse who has been in the 3D and visual effects industry since 2003, graduating from Griffith University with a degree in Industrial Design. He has most recently worked as a Technical Director at Industrial Light and Magic where he completed work on Transformers 3. He has extensive experience using commercially available software for water simulations as well as experience using proprietary software available inside Lucasfilm for generating Rigid Body (Physbam), Gas Simulations (Plume) and particle simulations (Zeno). Liam has been recently teaching VFX at fxphd and Griffith University Film School.