Runeterra

Call Of The Mountain - Legends Of Runeterra Game Teaser

Role: Houdini/3D Artist

Responsibilities: Previz | 3D Animation | 3D Simulations

Studio: Perception

Client: Riot Games

Year: 2020

Creative Director
- Johnny LePore
Producers
- Arianne Wotzka
- Eric Daly
Art Director
- David Wave
Lead Artist
- Billy Chitkin
Sculpting
- Patrick Goski
Particle Simulations
- Isaac Taracks
- Chris Szeto
- Ran Huo
Pyro Simulations
- Isaac Taracks
RBD Simulations
- Isaac Taracks
Look Development
- Billy Chitkin
- David Wave
- Eddie Livingstone
Compositing
- David Wave
- Billy Chitkin
- Eddie Livingstone
Editing
- David Wave

I was brought on to help the team at Perception out as a Houdini artist specializing in RBD and Pyro simulations on this project. I was responsible for creating most of the rock, pyro, and magic simulations. Working closely with the Creative Director/Art Director/Lead 3D Artist/and Compositors to ensure all simulation asset hand offs went smoothly. I started on the project helping the 3D team with shot animation previs, then moved into simulation RnD, and finally spending most of my time building simulations and assets for the 3D team to utilize. Working with the Lead 3D Artist: Billy Chitkin to ensure all simulation needs were accounted for and would work well in the hand off from Houdini to Cinema 4D and rendering with Redshift.

Process

Reference

My first day on the project I met with the Creative Director: Johnny LePore and he had these two references for how he felt the simulations in our project should move and feel.

RnD

Early on in the project I did RnD testing out different fracture amounts, simulation constraints, speed, weight, and export settings to work with Cinema 4D and rendering with Redshift.

Early in the process I made a contact sheet with 16 simulation wedges, all with slightly different simulation settings to allow the Creative Director a simple way to approve the simulation look and feel.

A collection of early flipbook renders apply the simulation setting from the contact sheet to more temp insinuation models as the final sculpt of the mountain and characters was still in development.

Sculpt Asset Prep

The final sculpt of the mountain and characters was exported from Zbrush at a extremely high poly count to retain all detail. I was responsible for ingesting the sculpt into Houdini and building a procedural node system that would take the high resolution sculpt, generate a temp low poly for the 3D team and myself to use for previs. The node system also took the high resolution sculpt and UVed it using UDIMs so the texture quality would hold up with how close some shots got to the model. I then took the UVed sculpt into Substance Painter and created smart materials that would generate masks for the 3D team to use. Utilizing the RGB channels to fit three different masks in a single texture to be as efficient as possible with the asset load per shot.

Magic Particle Simulations

Working along side fellow Houdini artist Chris Szeto & Ran Huo I built many particle simulations to work in tandem and accent the rock RBD simulations.

Mountain Lightning/Magic Simulations

I was tasked with creating the opening lightning strike and magic crack reveals. Built in Houdini and then exported for final look dev and rendering in Cinema 4D/Redshift by Billy Chitkin

Pyro Simulations

After the main RBD simulations had been approved I worked on generating debris and pyro simulations from them.

Cloud Simulations

The environment surrounding the hero mountain required a dense cloud layer as the camera moves in every direction around the mountain. Lead 3D Artist Billy Chitkin and I realized early on in the look dev phase that loading large cloud VDBs from Houdini into Cinema 4D and rendering with Redshift wasn’t feasible due to the hike in render times. We put together a system where I used Houdini’s GPU based viewport volumetric rendering, and loading in alembic files of each scene and camera I was able to render basic volume only passes for Billy to composite in with the main beauty render from Cinema 4D.

Additional Breakdowns

For a deeper look at how these simulations and assets I helped create were used in the look dev and final composite of shots I recommend checking out Lead Artist: Billy Chitkin’s breakdown on his site here.