C-130 HERCULES CRASH



This scene was made to showcase my ability to make effect come together as a whole. In this sequence a plane crashes, desintegrates and grinds to a halt. During this time a whole bunch of different effects work to sell the bigger effect.
Fire, smoke, debris, explosions, dirt, sparks, embers, shockwaves, destruction and wingtip vortices.

The scene is driven by a level sequence that control most of the animation. Some special cases, like the detaching plane parts, are handeled through blueprints.



The tree-line shockwave effect has a simple concept, yet very effective results.
This is how it works:

A material draws a spherical mask that has a point of origin of a blueprint in the level, the center of the explosion particle effect. The mask expands according to a parameter that is controlled through my scripted sequence blueprint.

The parameter is stored in a Material Parameter Collection and then sent to the material instance of the trees through a parameter collection node. This parameter controls a vertex offset animation which is centralised around the same blueprint as the spherical mask origo.

The tree meshes themselves have a gradient mask applied to them through the material editor, which makes sure that the tree-tops are swaying the most, while the tree trunk remain mostly unaffected.




The fire and explosion effects both have flipbook textures made in Houdini from a fluid simulation.

Most materials in this project can be used for multiple things as several parameters allow material instances to suit different needs.

Many attributes are controlled through a Dynamic Parameter in the material editor, which talks to the particle system in the Cascade particle editor.

I also mix the materials with a subtle MacroUV texture that scrolls on top of the particles to blend them together.



The wingtip vortices were created with vector fields and GPU particles. The red box that appears in the video is a very turbulent vector field, created with Maya Fluids, that drives the turbulent effect.

Normally, having this many particles spawned would bring a risk of massive overdraw issues, but since the particles are so far away from the camera, and thus very small, they don't cause much of a problem in this case.

The embers emitting from the fires are also GPU particles that gets a push from a vector field to create turbulence.




Two kinds of propellers were made; one with a material and the other with a regular mesh.

The material version is used to get a good silhouette and motion-blur at distance, but as the plane comes closer to the camera, and the propellers slow down, it's switched to the mesh version.




The C-130 was modeled in Maya and cut up at pre-determined breaking points. As the sequence plays out and the plane desintegrate, the pre-cut parts are hidden away from the main mesh and then spawned as physics objects in the scene.





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