Cerulean: Aerospace Simulations / Art Direction / Asset Creation

Aerospace is one of my greatest passions, and I’m continually looking for every opportunity to do more work in that field. When I have free time, I experiment and develop different approaches and assets to eventually produce full length shorts, whether for clients or myself. Several animatics and storyboards all use the working title Cerulean. This page is a grab bag / bits and bobs spot to collect experiments as they come.

Azure Rocket Lookdev & Model

After using stock models for years, time felt right to create something of my own. Inspired by the Space Launch System and the look of old Soviet rockets, I came up with the Azure. With quad solid rocket boosters and three stages, I gave myself a fantastic challenge. With the exception of the RS25 engine taken from the 2021 GUT job, the rocket is entirely custom. Modeled and UV’d entirely within Houdini, and textured with Substance Painter. The rocket is heavy, all told around 8 million polygons, though 30% is instanced. The high resolution is needed since several close up shots of it’s manufacturing is planned. The rest of the poly budget went to saturate detail to save time and effort in texturing. I went for a more weathered look, overdoing some of the grunge for fun. The only thing that’s missing now is the space craft within it’s fairing!

Solid Rocket Booster Exhaust Development

After modeling the Azure rocket, I got to work on refining my pyro process. I last worked on a small rocket exhaust in 2021 with GUT and 2020 for NASA, but I knew I could always do better. This was early days in running GPU based Axiom simulations, leaving behind Turbulence FD, which is how I’ve done most of my pyro simulations to date. After a few afternoons, I quickly got a look I was satisfied with, and moved on to other tasks. While I like the look, it doesn’t have nearly enough force behind it, which I rectified on the next pass.

Heavy Rocket Launch Development

The hero shot in the 2024 reel, I knew I wanted to go all out and give the Azure rocket a proper send off (for now!). I leveraged PDG in Houdini to wedge over 200 simulations across my network, running several instances of Axiom in parallel, in order to art direct the plume. Getting this look right was incredibly time consuming, but absolutely worth the effort. Once the main plume was solid, the rest of the sims fell into place instantly. Liquid oxygen rolling off the rocket, water deluge particle system on the pad, and even the rocket flame exhaust only took a day to nail.

The tower is a modified version of the SLS mobile launcher, with several adjustments to suit the Azure dimensions. The pad was custom and quickly modeled in Houdini and textured in Substance. This would only be visible from one camera angle, I didn’t spend much time on the detail. I intend to do so much more with this model and my evolving simulation workflow.

Shock Diamond - Afterburner Development

One of the earliest FX I wanted to crack, shock (or mach) diamonds! While I settled on this look for the shots for NASA and the reel, there’s still much more I’d like to do with this. A very straight forward setup, entirely with polygons and volume operations. I think I can math it up a bit more, and possibly combined with an axiom sim to add advection, and further refine the look. While built for the X59, I have an incomplete setup for the RS25 rocket engine. More to come!

Yeoman: Airship Exploration

A short put on pause, Yeoman would explore the wistful draw of airships. This would be the second airship I’ve modeled, this time loosely based on the R100 aircraft. Once again fully modeled and UV’d in Houdini, coming in at just under a million polygons. Future details are planned. Textured using procedural shaders from Substance and rendered in both Octane and Karma, being one of my first projects to test the Solaris environment. I animated a rough animatic for a previous concept, but I put it on pause to focus on client work. I also used this as an excuse to do some environment renders.