On this project, I was responsible for the smoke and debris simulations as the helicopter lifts off.
This was really satisfying to work on. I used a particle simulation driven by the helicopter’s propellers to give it that realistic feel – like the helicopter is actually what’s pushing the smoke and debris around. The result came out super cool.
I also developed a pipeline for the shots where the helicopters fly through clouds. I took a cloud library from Houdini and needed to bring it into Maya, but Maya doesn’t handle VDBs very well. So I created a workflow where I also export a polygon version of the clouds that’s easy to position in Maya, and with a click of a button it converts to volumes that Maya can work with and Arnold can render.