Ethereal Fire Dragon Effect That Will Inspired You to Start 3D

#News #Animation #Unreal Engine #Houdini

Ivan Ostanin used Unreal Engine and Houdini to the fullest.

VFX artist Ivan Ostanin has two stunning dragons to showcase his skills with: one that breathes out fire and one that can chomp enemies. Both are enveloped in flowing, electric effects that the artist created in Unreal Engine.

The effects follow the dragons' coiling and executing their targets flawlessly. Ostanin modeled and animated the creatures himself, even though it was an unusual project for him.

"I thought long and hard about how to make the scales, and at first I tried using planes to cover the body, and it worked right away. The only thing was that I had to try the scales a few times when I started working on the textures," he shared in his breakdown.

The artist used tutorials online to finish the work and make the animation look natural: "I did that procedurally, too. I collected all the necessary poses using curves and blended them."

He then added smoke to the body, camera shake, a decal under the character and started working on the impact.

"I didn’t use vertex animation in this case, although it can be a good solution in many scenarios. When you need to combine particles with character animation like this, vertex animation becomes difficult to manage. It is technically possible if everything is built in Houdini and exported as vertex animation textures for both the character and the particles, but this approach is not practical and can become expensive."

Instead, he used skeletal animation generated procedurally and handled the blending between animation curves manually, "since in this case it was more efficient than building a fully procedural system."

This is no simple task, of course. For the red dragon, it took over 45 hours to complete the project. The animation required 7 hours, textures, materials, the fire effect, decals, and smoke took almost 23 hours, and the sparkle on the left side, a material update for the dragon, and the 'alcohol' fire on the floor needed 3.5 hours

You should follow the thread here if you want to see how it was done and visit Ostanin's LinkedIn to check out his other works, like these smoke and fire effects.

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