Into the storm
3D World gets the lowdown on Stormborn Studios and their incredible FX work for the small screen
We hear from Stormborn Studios about tackling challenging Fxheavy sequences in TV
Founded in 2017, Stormborn Studios was built on 20 years of collective experience in VFX shared by its co-owners Manuel Tausch and Goran Pavles. The studio’s portfolio already boasts such prestigious productions as The Man In The High Castle, American Gods and Bioware’s action multiplayer game Anthem. 3D World caught up with Tausch and Pavles to find out what it’s like to set up your own VFX studio, why they choose to focus on Fx-heavy work, and how they achieved their most challenging sequence to date.
How did Stormborn Studios get started?
Over years of working as FX technical directors in the industry, it became evident that we like to think outside of the box and apply unconventional solutions to our goals. Traditional VFX studios usually move slowly when it comes to innovation since they rely on big, less flexible pipelines. Investing in new technologies costs money and is usually kept on the lower end of the expenses. We founded Stormborn as a means of encouraging and welcoming new ideas, especially because technology moves incredibly fast and as a company you have to stay ahead of the competition. Not only do we expect our artists to thrive in their own creativity, but also to take ownership of their work and be a part of the creative process. This leads to more dedication from the artists and inspires them to develop their skills and improve their techniques.
What’s it like to open a VFX studio?
Before launching Stormborn we were specialised artists and had little experience on how to run a business. Although we were confident and had the skills to meet the demands of our clients, suddenly we had to get used to wearing different hats outside of our comfort zone. This meant building up knowledge on how to network, approach new clients, bid on shows, conceptualise and programme an entire VFX pipeline, as well as hiring and supervising artists. It’s a learning process.
There are a few main challenges and a certain amount of luck involved. The best thing you can do is prepare as much as possible for unexpected events, be adaptive and stay positive. There is no magic solution, sometimes a project disappears or changes shortly before a deadline, a payment doesn’t come in, you hire a person that doesn’t work out, or you run out of power. Anything is possible. At Stormborn, we have one strategy above all. Impress the client and overdeliver while being proactive, genuine
and confident. No project is less worthy than another. If a project is not interesting enough, we don’t take it. If we decide to take it, it gets our full attention. Our reputation is our biggest asset and we look after it like a newborn baby.
Why did you choose to focus on Fxheavy sequences?
FX is the air we breathe. Throughout our careers, we have been fascinated by simulations, challenging tasks, unconventional solutions and procedural setups. We love to get really nerdy and talk about new technologies and different software solutions.
Dealing exclusively with simulationheavy projects requires expensive infrastructure and software, not to mention the difficulty of finding skilled artists that are the right fit for the job. Most small to mid-scale studios find that they do not have a full year requirement for FX, so maintaining a whole FX department might not be financially feasible. At the same time, bigger studios that have a dedicated FX division might not be available or don’t want to have projects that only feed one or two departments, as they focus on larger shows in general.
We see a niche where we can collaborate with other studios, allowing them to take on bigger projects that include Fx-heavy sequences that lie outside of their field of competence. At the same time, film productions are no longer forced to go to big VFX studios, they can get the same complexity and quality from us. Finally, FX sequence planning can be challenging for clients. It’s not easy to previs visuals that are difficult to achieve with keyframes. We can help with consultation and previs in the early stage of a project, and help the client have a clear vision of the final result.
How do you utilise state-of-the-art hardware and technology?
Our pipeline is founded on three main pillars. We chose Sidefx Houdini as our primary 3D software. Its procedural nature and ability to handle massive amounts of data makes it perfect for our day-to-day business. In terms of hardware, we love the price point of AMD’S Threadripper processors in combination with Nvidia’s GTX and RTX graphics cards. All of our workstations use this structure and allow for extremely heavy simulations.
The third pillar is using Redshift as our render engine. It allows us to double and even triple our render power without having to buy extra machines and licences. It’s an unbeatable combo. On top of these, we are developing a number of custom tools around Houdini to streamline the workflow and organise our output, enabling our artists to focus on what they do best.
Can you tell us about the challenging water FX you created for Project Blue Book?
We worked on a sequence for the final episode of season two, in which an unidentified object emerges from the ocean, speeds towards the navy vessel and plunges right in front, causing a huge tidal wave. In addition to this we took on another sequence in which a UFO is observed from the deck of the ship and provided a CG ocean for the
client. Our timeline was roughly three and a half months from previs to final delivery.
Being a Redshift-centric studio we had to develop in-house tools for render time displacement of the ocean spectra since Houdini’s ocean procedurals don’t natively support Redshift. We developed a HDA which we could point to any geometry node in Houdini and it would run up the node tree collecting displacement data from all connected ocean spectra. This data was then used by a custom shader that controlled Redshift’s displacement of a flat geometric grid, resulting in highly detailed waves. With this workflow we made a quasi render time procedural equivalent for Redshift.
The client had multiple shots of protagonists in dialogue on the moving ship from different camera angles. Rather than rendering a CG background ocean for each shot separately, which would have overwhelmed our render farm, we came up with the idea to build a full 360° dynamic ocean environment which gave our client the freedom to put it into their shots and rotate it to fit each scene correctly. This was done by rendering the ocean in eight slices and stitching those together in Nuke.
By far the greatest challenge was the breaking wave shot. We’re talking about a 350-frame, full-cg shot, including a 270-metre ship in full motion and effects elements like base FLIP simulation, whitewater foam, ocean waves crest, mist and spray. Additional elements included pouring water, the explosive wave break, various custom splash moments, as well as more than 70 simulated volumetric elements being emitted from the various simulations.
For the previs we worked directly with VFX supervisor John Gajdecki to build a procedural rig for the ship that directly interacted with the ocean spectrum. A few nifty sliders gave us artistic control of the ship’s motion. After presenting multiple versions we were able to lock down animation early on and start focusing on the simulations. To achieve the breaking wave, we generated a few volumetric masks and velocity fields from the main guiding wave geometry. By using this data the FLIP simulation artist was able to define when and how fast the water body would leap forward and barrel.
It was evident that we would have to split this shot up into several separate FX elements, due to the large scale of the scene. As soon as the base FLIP simulation was approved we had to build a system that would allow us to isolate sections of this base point cache in order to emit secondary simulations such as custom splashes, whitewater, foam, etc. Again a custom masking strategy based on point attributes made this possible, allowing for a high fidelity of detail and resolution. At the point of shot completion, after cleaning up obsolete data, the shot still contained more than five terabytes of simulation caches.
Project Blue Book is the most challenging show Stormborn has been tasked with so far. It taught us new techniques, pushed our infrastructure to its limits, expanded our network of artists and clients, and left us proud and confident looking forward to more challenging and exciting projects.
Discover more of the studio’s work at www.stormbornvfx.com
“WE BUILT A FULL 360° DYNAMIC OCEAN ENVIRONMENT BY RENDERING THE OCEAN IN EIGHT SLICES AND STITCHING IN NUKE”