CREATE GNARLY BATTLE DAMAGE FOR VEHICLES

Whiskytree's CG supervisor J.P. Monroy reveals the studio's process for generating realistic battle scars on fighter planes

- J.P. Monroy

Creating the effect of battle damage on a 3D asset often takes the skill of multiple VFX artists, but is by all accounts a relatively straightforward process to work on. However, that simplicity can be misleading when faced with complex sequences involving multiple assets. Plus, most jobs will require you to iterate quickly, match your work to a plate, and handle production-level hero assets with hundreds of UDIMs from different VFX vendors.

This was the case for us at Whiskytree on a high-profile TV show our team recently worked on. While tools like Houdini and Blender’s Geometry Nodes would usually be the port of call for procedural tasks, we needed a workflow that would allow for render-time damage without affecting the underlying shaders or geometry of the asset.

To solve this creative problem, we considered manually sculpting damage for several sequences – a workflow that would tie up multiple artists for weeks with slow iterations – or developing a scalable and adaptable workflow that allowed us to make ongoing changes and feedback. Naturally we went for the latter, utilising our lighting and scene assembly tool, Gaffer, to facilitate the procedural aspects and stay responsive to the show’s everchanging art direction.

For this tutorial, I’ll provide an overview of the approach we took to tackling this challenge at Whiskytree, including how we created assets for the Boolean operations, positioned these assets onto a model, explored the procedural aspects, and layered in comp. We used the aforementioned trio of Gaffer, Maya and Nuke in our process, but you should still be able to apply these same steps to whichever tools you want to use in your own personal VFX production pipeline.

01 START WITH DAMAGE OUTLINES