LEGO: Super Secret Police Dropship Explodes Batmobile
FEBRUARY 2023
This piece was a sideline project which I undertook, during the 5 week Houdini simulation course at Visual Magic, to combine an RBD and PYRO sim together. To challenge myself, I thought I'd try and replicate a short scene from The Lego Movie whereby a Super Secret Police Dropship blows up the Batmobile. The final part of the scene is a little different as I opted for the explosion and disintegration of the Batmobile to be more simulated, rather than the sylized version they went for in the movie.
Overall, I am very happy with all the new Houdini skills I have learnt from undertaking this project, namely steps forward in animation, keyframing, lighting/use of light masks, and rendering within Mantra. I'm not overly happy with the pyro explosion simulation itself, as it doesn't fit the scene as nicely as I would have hoped, and I have sadly been unable to figure out how to stop the LEGO bricks overlapping. This project could do with more work on the polish, and a revised render setup, but I just have to leave it and carry on with other tasks at-hand (I'll try not to lose too much sleep over those translucent yellow lights on the front of the Batmobile not looking right!)
The LEGO assets were both made and sourced from Stud.io and Mecabricks.com
I've really enjoyed working with digital LEGO and would like to try my hand at another Houdini simulation, using this medium.
The final render of my combined RBD and PYRO simulation inside Houdini.
A behind the scenes look at the viewport and RBD VDB collision setup, inside the DOP Network. The VDB was used to generate a high degree of accuracy for the collisions from the concave pieces of the Batmobile.
A frame by frame slice of the explosion. To get the look I wanted, to resemble the reference, I had to art direct the lighting of the explosion, with additional keyframed red lighting on the dropship windscreen and dimming off lights in the background.
A snapshot of my scene setup within the viewport. The dropship was keyframe animated along a curve and white boxed areas helped to create the shadows and lighting I required.
More of a modern art masterpiece than anything else. The majority of the bottom half of this geo area is the forced, keyframed, lighting for the explosion. I accept there must be a more efficent workflow but this got the job done.
This is how my node tree looks for the dropship. The arms coming off to the side are the relative parts of the geometry being turned on and off to enable the red and blue police light sequence...
These are the principled shaders I used. As with the entire project, there's no doubt better methods but this somehow managed not to break the render!
A snapshot of the short video sequence I referenced from The Lego Movie. My explosion is simulated rather than stylized. All copyrights and trademarks belong to Warner Bros and The Lego Group.