Star Wars - "The Sith's Wrath"

After completing Voxyde's Ultimate FX in Houdini workshop, participants were given a final challenge to apply everything learned in their own unique way. We were provided with a few key assets — the main character, animation, and camera — but everything else was left entirely up to us. It was an open-ended assignment that encouraged each artist to craft their own story and bring it to life. My pipeline for this shot moved through Photoshop and PureRef for preproduction planning, Maya for animation and blocking, Substance Painter for texturing, Houdini for VFX, environment, lighting, and rendering with Karma, and Nuke and After Effects for compositing.
As someone still relatively new to both Houdini and Nuke, this project came with its fair share of challenges. While I've spent three years working in 3D, my foundation has primarily been in Maya, and the shift to Houdini required building an entirely new way of thinking. The destruction and smoke FX pushed me the hardest — I spent a lot of time watching and rewatching tutorials before the techniques finally clicked. Instancing the droids brought its own complications as well. The original plan involved a crowd simulation with ragdoll FX, but when that approach fell through, I had to find alternative methods to instance the battle droids manually. Texturing the environment in Karma was another steep hill, with displacement maps and noise patterns sending me through many hours of trial and error before landing on workable solutions.
Despite those hurdles, this challenge gave me a meaningful opportunity to grow in two tools I'm genuinely passionate about and hope to build my career around. It laid a strong foundation for future work and resulted in a shot I'm proud to carry into my portfolio and demo reel.