I had the chance to work with the talented folks at Bigstar on this teaser for Game of Thrones. As a Game of Thrones fan it was really satisfying to work on and as an FX Artist, it was an amazing opportunity. I did the dynamic simulations and FX including fracturing, rigid body simulations, dust, wild fire, smoke, debris and snow. I also contributed in compsiting of the FX elements.

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This spot gave me the chance to test out the workflow between Cinema 4D and 3DS Max since the rendering all came from C4D and Octane, which turned out to have minimal issues using the alembic file format. I would still have greatly preferred to use Thinkbox Xmesh but it's not available in C4D (yet?). The fracturing was done with Rayfire, which became a quite involved because there were many individual pieces to the models, which needed to be fractured as a single object and of course needed to maintain UVs and separate material IDs for the different parts of the models. The models were fractured in a very specific way to increase detail in certain areas while maintaining large, mountainous pieces but it was no issue for Rayfire as long as a bit of preliminary preparation is considered. In the dragon breaking shot, the fractures had around 4-5 thousand larger pieces with lots of additional tiny particulate debris.

 

The rigid body simulation was accomplished with Realflow's Caronte solver, which was really fantastic for this project because it works on mesh faces, not just convex hulls and allows very specific control of forces. It is also well prepared for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of objects in the same simulation by using multibodies. This allowed me to fracture in a more random and realistic way and avoid any consistent voronoi shapes in the pieces. The green wild fire was simulated in Phoenix FD and rendered with Vray. Phoenix FD quickly became my favorite tool for smoke and fire and with this spot, we had some other fire elements that didn't make it to the final cut but looked really cool so I included them in the FX/Dynamics Breakdown. The spot features many subtle additional particles, debris, and snow, which were created with Particle Flow in 3DS Max.

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This is one of my favorite projects to date and seeing it exceed 39 million views is especially rewarding for all of the talented artists involved. But most of the credit for that huge audience and following goes to the ridiculously awesome show and it's creators.