Eloi Andaluz Fullà is a visual effects artist originally from Spain – he’s made his mark in the industry by mastering Thinking Particles, software from cebas that lets artists create procedural and dynamics effects. You will have seen Thinking Particles work in many feature films, including Eloi’s work at Scanline VFX recently on Batman v Superman and the upcoming Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. We talked to Eloi about his own personal experiments with Thinking Particles and achievements with Scanline.
fxg: Can you give us a quick rundown of your experience in VFX and also in using Thinking Particles?
Eloi: I started architecture in 2002, at the same time I discovered 3ds Max and I started learning it on my own. At the beginning I focused on architectural visualization while I was working in different studios as an architect. First I tried to learn everything possible, I touched mostly 3ds Max but also Cinema 4D, Houdini, Maya, After Effects, tracking programs, and I tried to press all buttons available on the software. During my studies I joined a 3d company in Barcelona where I helped them after my architectural classes. They were doing mostly videos for archviz, but sometimes we did TV advertising, and I started to get passionate there for all fx possibilities. I began learning Particle Flow, FumeFX, Real Flow and others.
At this point I finished my career in architecture, I did a master in structural analysis and a course in renewable energies but I realized that I was much more passionate about 3d than I was with architecture. So I moved from an architectural studio to a company where we created videomapping shows and 3d videos for operas. During this period I discovered Thinking Particles, and after the creation of some tools Cebas asked me to join the Thinking Particles beta where I met other Thinking Particles users like Joe Scarr.
In 2008 a big crisis started in Spain, I was doing different freelance jobs for Spanish companies, but most of them had problems in paying. So in 2012, tired of the situation, I decided to move to another country. At the end of 2012 I joined Moment Factory in Montreal. MF focused on videomapping shows, interactive installations and music shows. I was mainly in charge of fx, but had a generalist role. In the company you needed to model, animate, illuminate, render and comp all your shots, so you could work in all areas from start to the end. I did really cool projects with them, mappings all around the world, shows for Childish Gambino, Outkast’s tour, a show for the Super Bowl in New York, projects with real robots with screens in a ship for Royal Caribbean, shoots with a milo camera, and a long list. At this point I also did freelance jobs for companies in Montreal and Thinking Particles tools on demand for studios in New York and Los Angeles.
In 2014, Joe Scarr, who I met from the beta in Thinking Particles, asked me to join Scanline VFX. I already knew part of the amazing team they have, and they were working on cool projects, so even though I was having a great time at Moment Factory I simply couldn’t refuse the invitation, and so joined them.
fxg: Why do you use Thinking Particles? What is about Thinking Particles as tool that you especially like?
Eloi: I remember my first time using Thinking Particles, and the beginning was a little confusing. I think this the first impression a lot of people have, it is really different if you come from pflow. But after a small tutorial I followed about Shape Collision and VolumeBreak I saw all the potential Thinking Particles has, and I couldn’t believe there was no more information on the web about it, because was like a revelation for me.
Thinking Particles is a total open box, 3ds Max has a lot of plugins for different areas and thousand of scripts, but most of them are limited to what the creator of the tool wants that you do with it. In Thinking Particles you can create any tool you want with nearly no limitations.
At the same time Thinking Particles is very direct and fast to sketch what you want. In minutes you can create a system that roughly does what you have in mind, show it to your supervisor, and after refining it creating additional dynamic sets.
In contrast with other fx software, Thinking Particles has for me the correct level of “deepness” – you can go deep enough to create a lot of tools, but the software doesn’t go so deep that you need a lot of nodes or time to do basic actions. If you add to all of this that Thinking Particles has one of the best rigid bodies solver in the market (Shape Collision), but also you can combine it with Bullet physics, the very robust hierarchical caching, and the ability to break any particle procedurally, with a very good integration with 3ds Max, for me is the perfect tool for fx.
fxg: Can you talk about a previous film project and how Thinking Particles was used on a specific shot or sequence?
Eloi: I use Thinking Particles in all projects I work and is one of my main tools, used in many projects: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Independence Day: Resurgence, and Pan, for example. Thinking Particles is so versatile that we use it for a lot of different tasks, we used it for fairies swarm control, for dynamic trees, smashing cars, ropes, smashing glass, soil dynamics etc.
In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice we used Thinking Particles for all rigid body dynamics involved. All the wooden destruction on the warehouse was done using the always reliable Shape Collision system in Thinking Particles. I used Shape collision also when the Batmobile breaks the wall to enter inside another warehouse (see 1:02 in this trailer):
Shape Collision works very well for these shots, only with friction bricks stay together like you are using joints (or glue). With additional rules in Thinking Particles I added specific velocities on some chunks to direct the wall brick explosion as needed. With additional dynamic sets some bricks breaks again using Volume Break depending of his velocity and when they touch the ground or the Batmobile.
After showing the first version to Scanline’s Harry Mukhopadhyay, DFX supervisor on the project, he asked for more bricks falling from the wall. So in a separate sim I selected procedurally some of the remaining bricks and activated them to fall at the time I wanted.
Some bricks get stuck over the Batmobile that were not desired – with some simple rules and forces I made the pieces from the first sim move away and fall in a natural motion using Shape Collision. I didn’t need to send all the pieces again, thanks to Thinking Particles logic only the desired pieces go into the calculations so this cache takes no longer than 2 minutes.
I created one last sim on top of the previous ones where I used Bullet physics to drive smaller debris that interacted with the bigger bricks and the environment. To finish the shot I used the main brick Thinking Particles sim in Flowline to create a dirt and dust trail. Flowline, Scanline VFX’s proprietary fluid tool, communicates very well with Thinking Particles. We can choose specific groups from Thinking Particles to emit from, collide and advect velocities, with velocities and sizes dependencies.
fxg: Have you seen some other work recently done with Thinking Particles that you’d like to give a shout out to?
Eloi: I’m very happy that the Thinking Particles community is growing a lot during this last years. You can see much more content, and also much more quality! Just take a look on the vimeo group for Thinking Particles, to see a lot of destructions, and also a lot of creative ways to use Thinking Particles.
I really like when I see people pushing the limits of Thinking Particles in creative ways, one good example is Santibono, and his tools:
fxg: Tell us about some of the Thinking Particles tools/plugins you’ve developed, such as Air Master?
Eloi: My first tool was Demolition Master. I was learning Thinking Particles and decided to create a tool of my own to apply what I was learning. At some point I did a basic video showing what could be done, and a lot of users asked to download it.
A lot of people started using it for work production, but others used for learning purposes or just for fun. Some people are scared at the beginning using Thinking Particles, and they like to have a look at pre-made tools. Also the cool thing with a Thinking Particles tool is that you have a base but you can expand as much as you want or adapt to different projects.
After this first tool I did a lot of mappings, and I realized that for mapping shows is very usual to create a lot of geometry moving or rotating with a delay. Cinema 4D has mograph, really useful for that, for 3ds Max at the beginning we only had key transfer script. It was a very cool script but you didn’t have a direct feedback of what you was doing. So one day, I started developing Radius Effector. The basic idea is easy, you have a point and objects move, rotate, or scale based on the distance to this point. I tried to make it very flexible, and as easy and simple as possible. I think a good tool needs be able to be used in a lot of scenarios, but at the same time needs to have very direct controls.
I think sharing this tools helps other people, that maybe they can be afraid to start in Thinking Particles, to start using it and discovering what Thinking Particles can do.
fxg: Can you talk briefly about the fun Thinking Particles muffins demo you made and what you were trying to show/achieve with it?
Eloi: I’m beta tester for Thinking Particles, and we have on a regular basis new operators that we need to test. We had the new snapshoot that creates a single mesh from a group of particles. We also had some changes on the SPH fluid solver, so I decided to combine multiple things to test them. I did something similar when I was testing Thinking Particles 6.
I always like to use the tools in a different ways to what they were made for, so instead of using the flow solver for liquids I decided to use it as a bakery product. At the beginning the only thing I wanted to show were the particles with implicit shape falling in a container with a specific shape, and use snapshoot to transform the implicit shape into a rigid body, and that everything was procedural. I don’t know why I came up with the idea to do muffins, maybe because I was hungry :). I decided to add a couple of other things, like chocolate that adapts to the muffin, cloth, and to add stuff in the scene to check that everything was working as expected.
fxg: What do you think are some things you can do in Thinking Particles that people might be surprised about?
Eloi: Possibilities with Thinking Particles are endless right now, and with the constant addition of new tools, we have more and more options.
I did a sand system before Houdini launched its granular solver. I keep improving it and adapting it to different situations. While a granular system is really realistic, it takes usually more than 10 hours for a medium res simulation of 100 frames, this makes it difficult to create multiple iterations fast or art direct your sims.
With my Thinking Particles “fake” method, I can do sims that look realistic under an hour. Less sim times means more iterations over the shoot and at the end more control. I used this system on Miss Peregine’s Home for Peculiar Children (see 1.52 in this trailer):
Any change asked on the motion takes me exactly less than 1 hour and half to sim and render the final shot.
Even I was surprised creating a pinball in Thinking Particles. One day I think…will it be possible to create a pinball in Thinking Particles and play with it? In less than 4 hours I had a functional pinball working in realtime! I had the flips, a punctuation system, ball recovery system, bouncers, even the tilt was working! I pass some days refining it and modelling a hi-res model, but I was surprise how fast you can pass from an idea to an execution in Thinking Particles.
fxg: What advice do you have for Thinking Particles artists looking to take the next step with the tool, to become a more advanced user?
Eloi: The secret is do a lot of tutorials to learn new techniques at the beginning. Right now there are a lot of very good tutorials for free online, and also other very good for not much money. I have a list of all material available online here: http://www.andvfx.com/1391/thinking-particles-resources/
Once you are good with general techniques in Thinking Particles, don’t only check for Thinking Particles tutorials, you can look for Houdini or Cinema 4D videos and replicate the ideas in Thinking Particles without so many problems. Most of the time it’s not what button to press but the idea to make it work. And obviously a lot of practice, and trying to take it a step further. The more frustration you find trying to archive an effect, the more you will learn trying to solve your problems.
fxg: What is the Thinking Particles community like – can you talk about how you liaise with Cebas on the product, and where artists can get more information and talk about developments?
Eloi: Beta is a pretty close community. We have a new Thinking Particles version in an alpha/beta stage around once or twice a month, with new features and bug fixes. We test and debug and give feedback. Also Edwin is open to suggestions from beta testers and users. We request a lot of things, but if it’s possible and a good idea usually we see them implemented.
Usually the news on the beta is kept confidential between beta users until there is a mature version to go out. The Thinking Particles community is growing a lot on previous years. There are more and more vimeo users showing and sharing Thinking Particles tutorials and projects, and there is a lot of information on the comments. Also on the Thinking Particles Facebook group there are a lot of questions, and a lot of people from the beta answer them as fast as we can.
fxg: What would you like to see in the next release of Thinking Particles? What are some features you wish were in there?
Eloi: Since Thinking Particles 6 we saw a lot of new features added. We received softbodies, a SPH system, smoke dynamics, roughness for VB, a new cache system…
I would like next year to improve what we already have – improvements on VolumeBreak, that I think is one of the biggest strength of Thinking Particles, with a cluster system, and improving the roughness. I would like to see SPH improvements with deforming boundaries, and being able to control SPH properties by particle.
Bullet is very well implemented on Thinking Particles and really fast, but I would like to see an improvement on accuracy. For example, mesh shapes can be more accurate. I hope to see improvements on implicit surface as well. Right now it is robust and really fast, but I hope we can have color per vertex on the implicit shape based on color particles, for example. And extending this, in a short future, I hope that we can have particle vertex control, something similar to genome, this will take time, but well, it’s a wish.
fxg: Can you list 3 expert Thinking Particles tips and tricks that you’d like to share with artists that help in your workflow?
Eloi: Yes, here are 3 tips:
1. Keep it simple: it is very easy in Thinking Particles to keep adding more and more nodes to try to correct a simple problem. But some times instead of adding more rules, it is good to stop, think a little, why is this happening? Instead of creating more rules, can I change something that I already have build to solve it? Simpler dynamicsets means that is easier to know what you are modifying, and easier to read and understand for another artist in your team, and for yourself if you need to touch it again some weeks later. If you can do something with 3 nodes, don’t use 6.
2. Organize and name it correctly: it’s easy (it happens to me a lot) to try to do a fast system and don’t name anything on your system. It’s good to at some point pass some time naming your dynamicsets and nodes properly. It will help a lot later to be able to find what you are looking for faster.
3. Divide and conquer: when you have a new shot to do, even if it looks really complicated, it’s always easier to break it into smaller and simpler parts. Instead of trying to attack all the effect at once, think hierarchical. Let’s say you need to break the ground. First you can animate big pieces to block out your effect. Send this to Thinking Particles on a first simulation where you use Shape Collision for good detail collisions on the bigger fragments. You can do a second and a third simulation with smaller detail, volumebreaking more some of the pieces. On top of that you can do a new simulation with Bullet physics for finer detail, and on top of that you can have an extra dynamic set to arrange some parts of your sim in a manual way. Hierarchically caching – it’s a really good way to work, and Thinking Particles is the best on that.
Find out more about Eloi’s work at his website: http://www.andvfx.com/