DESCRIPTION

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Blücher is a historical feature film about the sinking of the German battle cruiser during the invasion of Norway in World War II. My main responsibilities were simulating fire and smoke for the burning ship, as well as creating muzzle-flash FX for the cannons. I also handled the modeling for the hero shot of the cannon adjusting for its first salvo, along with creating the Lützow asset used in the sequence depicting the attack on Oscarsborg the following day.

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This was my most technical project to date, with significant work going into mastering Embergen as a real-time pyro simulator. Combining Embergen simulations with custom shading and rendering in Blender allowed me to achieve results comparable to Houdini-based workflows while maintaining a much faster iteration speed. I see this real-time approach as a strong indication of where FX workflows are heading.

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All work was done in Blender, Embergen, and Substance Painter. Most shots in the reel were handled entirely by me from start to finish, with a few shots incorporating my assets into larger compositions by another artist.