Swarm

Sceptre magic shot from my groups final year film Swarm. Basic idea was to show the sceptre activating and charging up by absorbing energy to be released at Jakob our creature. I was responsible for all FX layers as well as the shading, rendering and compositing of this shot. Due to the lensing effect of black holes a lot of RnD had to be done to give the lens warping effect. Karma lacks the same support Mantra does for VEX shading so creating some sort of ray marching setup like other artists have done using Mantra would not be possible for use in Karma. Instead multiple layers of transmissive ‘shells’ were used each sitting inside the other to create a lens. Inside the shader, a fresnel was used as a mask and along with other math nodes, the output was used as the IOR of the lens creating a similar effect to that of a blackhole.

Rendering each pass seperately with a deep pass would not work due to the deep samples being stopped on the outside of the lens. More Rnd had to be done to seperate each FX element into layers for compositing. I rendered a ST map using the lens in front of it as a way to warp the background plate and smoke and stone layers.

Responsible for all CG (POP, Pyro)