Cebas - Visual Technology

Piotr Suchodolski of Platige 'spill the beans'
  on his amazing VFX work!

 

Today, cebas Visual Technology has the pleasure of interviewing Platige's Piotr Suchodolski, an amazingly talented artist from Poland.   

 

Cebas: Piotr, thank you so much for taking time from your tight schedule to speak to cebas, please tell us about your recent projects / past favourite projects involving thinkingParticles. It could be something that you enjoyed creating or something significant to your achievements or your company's. Please tell us how you were involved?

Piotr: First of, thank you for giving me the opportunity. I feel truly humbled by your decision to include my interview among so many talented and well known artists. My name is Piotr Suchodolski. I come from Poland. I love setting things on fire, blowing stuff up and watching progress bars go. I’ve been using Thinking Particles for almost 5 years now.

The first project that I’ve used it in was The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf trailer.
Back then, RBD simulation options for 3d Max were rather limited and that was the moment when I thought: “hey! Maybe I can try tP out”.

We used Thinking Particles in Platige Image extensively. From what I remember, the project that really made us decide to completely switch to thinkingParticles was The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings trailer.

 

 

 

 

Cebas: Which shots/images in particular were you involved in? 

Piotr: The thing that I’m most proud of are the simulations that I’ve done in 2014 for the project “Ambition” by the European Space Agency. My main task in this project was to create enormous explosion of comets hitting the ground. Although the visuals were created using FumeFX, I knew from the get go that the fundamentals
would be created in Thinking Particles.
 
This is how I mainly use Thinking Particles. FumeFX is a really great plug-in but I love to extend its capabilities by building a solid thinkingParticle system and controlling the fluid simulation with it. In the shot, that you see on this clip, with comets everything from radius to color emission was set within tP.

 

 

When it comes to that kind of shots, where I had to create something I’ve never faced with, I had to come up with a system that could handle changes easily and be manipulated. I knew we didn’t have time to spend looking for new simulation settings everytime the director wanted to change something.

After diving in, I found that the system itself was pretty powerful and of course, complicated (I love to build very heavy systems with hundreds of connections) but thanks to the event-based approach of thinkingParticles and the ability to build complex dependencies, I could expose only 4 parameters to the main interface and that was all I needed. It all boiled down to setting the radius of explosion, general direction, magnitude of explosion and a ratio of thick dust clouds to thinner parts. This was amazing.  

In the end simplicity of control has been achieved and all I had to focus on was FumeFX simulations. Without Thinking Particles, the process would be painful and I really can’t imagine me creating with otherwise.

  

Cebas: what features in our plugin in particular helped you achieve your creative goal(s) and did you have to figure out a lot of things?

Piotr: most of the time I spend working in thinkingParticles is playing around with the helpers. The variety of options they offer is amazing. “Math” and “ParticleData” are definitely my favourite ones. Come to think of it, it’s what data and how can I process it. In Thinking Particles you can do really a lot with what you have. I love it!

I think that the BlackBox called “Power, Unlimited power” is the best representation of it. Without mush ado about “Math” here, I’d really fail after creating the very first dynamic set. Although I tried to make this effect as organic looking as possible, it’s actually very technical and quite mathematical at its core.

 

Cebas: what do you find are the most difficult aspects of 3d/ fx design work - is it technology or artistic creativity? And how do you resolve this ? What was the most fun or rewarding part of this project for you?

Piotr: my dear friend, Kuba, taught me one important thing:
You have to have a clear image in your head, you have to see the effect even before you put down the first particle and just go from there.

I think that the most difficult part for me is to keep the technicalities and complexity just at the level that help me create the effect I want. Responsiveness of the built system, the ability to easily change things to meet the goal that’s in my head is the key. Because in the end, what matters is the final effect, the technology I use is just a mean to achieve it.

Sure, what I learn along the way is as important but that’s only for me, not so much the client. For the client, I must give them the visual effects they want.
 

Cebas: How did cebas software integrate into your production pipeline? How straightforward was it?

Piotr: thinkingParticles is a great way to process data. I’d really like to see more communication with the outside of tP interface (both on the input and output side), less rigid structures inside tP and better handling of large amount of objects and its properties.

That said, thinkingParticles integrates really nicely with FumeFX, mainly because I can use TP-floatData as an input in particle sources and vice versa - through FumeFX Probe. Its channels are exposed for the Krakatoa and Frost for the final tuning - also amazing. 

Thank you once again for the opportunity :) 

Cebas: Thank you so much Piotr, for sharing all these wonderful experiences with the VFX community. We wish you all the best and look foward to more great VFX in the future!