Lootbox

This project is my final deliverable for the VFX course. I wanted to do some blood effects so a Mimic was a nice fit.

The wall and floor textures were found on www.polyhaven.com, I got the torch mesh and fire flipbook from a TGA assignment.

Most of the work was done in Houdini, I got the chest model from TGA and modelled and added the teeth to the chest via scattering/copytopoints.

I animated the chest in Maya with the rig provided by TGA and then imported it into Houdini so I could use it for simulation collisions.

The simulations were all brought into Unreal Engine using VATs.


The toungue is a mesh built by sweeping a spiral curve that I unrolled and then rolled back up.
Inside Unreal I use dynamic parameters to pause and unpause the VAT material so that I could sync it with the blood fx and control the timing.

Once I had the mesh unrolled I ran it through a vellum sim to fix the self collisions and make the movement more natural.

I had some issues with shadows on the VAT. The shadow bounds are calculated from the start frame, so I had to move place an extra frame with the tongue fully extended at the start of the exported animation, and then displace it by normals to make it cover the entire space of the animation.

A hit reaction for when the chest closes.

The blood splashes were made with Flip using the chest mesh for the collisions.
I learned a lot from this SIGGRAPH talk Mortal Kombat 11: A Bloody Production Talk. Although I went with VATs for it instead of alembic caches.

Then in Blueprints it’s an embarrassing amount of delay and dynamic parameter nodes to bring it all together.

The ball was also a VAT, I basically copied it to a point on the tongue and manually keyframed the scale and some position fixes so it would remain hidden until the tongue finished unrolling.

The tongue material was quickly done in substance painter. I went a bit overboard with the Normals cause I wanted the tongue to feel wet, rough and disgusting.

The blood material was really simple, dark red color, very low roughness, purple subsurface and I committed a cardinal sin and made it metallic.

Overall this was a very rushed project as I didn’t have a lot of experience using VATs, so there was a lot of trial and error to get it up and running.