Halloween Dissection, by Chris Harkins.

Halloween is one of the most fun holidays we have in the year. For artists, it gives us an opportunity to explore creative avenues not often traveled.  So when brainstorming for this year's Halloween greeting, it only seemed appropriate to feature zombies.  Zombies are in!

View Finished Project on our youtube channel here!

This little project had all of the components of a full-sized production, just miniature in scale. Even at a mere 20-second play time, a lot of resources can be wasted without first deciding on how to frame everything. It all starts with pencil and paper. Once I established the framing, I modeled, surfaced and placed each prop into the environment. Organic objects like the grass and trees were created using GrowFX for 3DS Max.  This fantastic plugin gives you loads of options, but is still simple enough to use efficiently.  Experimentation was fun.  The trees basically consist of a trunk segment, a few levels of branches and leaves - all with various modifiers for twist, noise and wind. 

One particularly exciting part of the micro-project was to utilize interoperability between 3 Autodesk applications: 3DS Max, Softimage and Mudbox. There is not one application that does everything the best - all applications have their strengths and weaknesses. The key is using the strongest tool for the job, whatever that may be. The challenge is then doing so efficiently, making sure the data shared between them crosses over correctly. For example, the undead hand was a hand I pulled from an old character of mine - an old Softimage project. I made some adjustments to the fingers to bjeckerte boney and longer in Max, then exported that hand into Mudbox to paint on some textures to make the hand look undead - basic projection painting. I rigged and animated the hand in Softimage, because I'm more familiar with Softimage rigging/animation and find it to be superior to Max's solution - at least for my purposes. I exported the tombstone, ground plane and camera into Softimage (via interoperability feature) for reference. Once animated in Softimage, I exported the animation as pointcache and applied that data to the hand back in 3DS Max.

The more challenging part of this short was breaking the hand through the dirt. My initial approach was to simulate a dynamic breakup using Softimage ICE/Lagoa, but for time and ease, I ended up with a very simple solution of creating an animated broken dirt object animate around the hand via shape animation. I also added some simple pflow particles to explode from the impact as the hand pushes through. This treatment might not hold up under a sunny day, but the moonlight haze of an zombie apocalyptic eve is very forgiving.

Compositing all of the render layers together was fairly straight forward. I wanted the environment to be thick and creepy, so I rendered out 2 separate vray environment fog passes; one for low fog and one for a larger, thinner air fog. Both passes were animated with a fractal noise offset, to give the impression the fog slowly rolls by. The VRay renderer is powerful and pleasant to use. It's fast, consistent and easy to understand. On top of that, I was able to easily output render elements for aiding the compositing stage. For example, I wanted to tweak the color of the hand and was able to do so with a matte layer of just the hand. In post, I could quickly tweak most anything after hours of rendering. The composition is combination of color corrections, fog adjustment layers and some other fancy effects.

For the final touches, music and sound effects were created by Joel E.  This was intentionally kept this a little bit cheesy to fit with the 50's horror movie style.  Little animations like this are great excursions because you can bundle research/development and play time into one product, without tight restrictions on time or budget.  Below are some screen grabs from the different apps used for those who are interested.  Happy Halloween Everyone!