creating THE orb

VFX technical director aleksandr uusmees talks us through the creation of the orbs in houdini

“The spheres I created for the film The Beyond were created by what’s called the advecting particles technique. I created a smoke simulation using Pyro Solver, because I needed gaseous natural-looking movement to drive the particles. It is very important to work on the source as much as possible and not to dive into the ‘dopnet’ right away. The source will determine 4550% of your simulation look.

“The next step was to advect the particles. I added additional forces and drag to the particles to get extra control. The Orb system was built so it was very easy to create multiple versions. Once I was happy with the look and feel of the effect I needed to project some movement onto the sphere. For that I used the ray node; plus I could control the force of attraction and lift. The final step was to increase the number of particles. It gave the whole effect very much a liquid look, but kept it as separate particles.

“The built system had many controls and I could do different variations and address notes from the director in a short period of time. For the dispersion event shown in the final effect, I used POP Curve Force and POP Attract. For me it was the fastest and was an art directable way to create an interesting look on the final dispersion of the sphere.”