I was very fortunate to work on this project over the summer of 2021 for the Summer Industry Course. We had the support of industry mentors from Dreamworks Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and more. My lead roles were FX and Project Management.
I also modeled the leaves and created the set dressing rigs in Houdini for the leaves and rubble placed around the scene. A breakdown of the tool can be seen in the video below. Much of the set dressing on the body was done by hand.
I used a particle sim to create the movement for the leaf animation that's in the background (the foreground leaves were hand-animated). My greatest challenge on the project was finding an effective and efficient solution for the leaf sim. Earlier iterations were using rigid bodies and it was costly to transfer into the scene.
The dust was created with a dynamic simulation in Houdini. I also added an aspect of collision detection so the particles wouldn't clip through the floor.
The wires' animation was a fun challenge I took on in the last week. I used Maya's nCloth for the setup and wrote expressions into the nucleus parameters to randomize the wind, direction, and speed.