Original Eureka Shot as aired

My remade Version of the Shot

This effect is a remake of an existing one. My version has never been aired or is part of any production. Just for my own pleasure.

I watched Eureka and in Series 02 Episode 11 there is this cool map effect I wanted to recreate. First of all I organized a HD version of the episode and extracted the sequence I want to edit.

Then I google-earthed for a nice map plate I could use. It's a place in Berlin.

I edited the map in photoshop. I had to create a map for the particles to emit from. So that they only emit where houses are. Just a simple Black/White map.

In Maya I created two planes. One would have been enough but due to debuging and overview reasons I created two seperate ones. One for the actual map texture and one for the emitters with the emit texture on it.

For the emit plane I created two surface emitters. One for the bigger particles and one for the smaller ones. Instead of emitting a lot more particles for the small ones I used the Multi-Point Particle Shape. So one particle will create 30 instances. Saves a lot of time and cpu power and in this the trick perfectly works, too.

The small particles looked a little bit too "generated" so I gave them a turbulence field to add some randomness in their motion. It has a very low magnitude but makes it move a little bit more natural.

In the shot the particles just pop-up and pop-away when they are born/die. I wanted to get rid of that, too. So I added a ramp for the lifespan that makes them fade-in and -out. Think that looks nicer.

Last but not least I had to add a nice camera move. So I added a camera with an aim. For the camera animation I created a curve on which I contrained the camera. So the move will be really nice and organic. Hand animated camera always look dull. And by attaching it to a curve I also had the possibility to change the path any time without big hazzle.

Several Playblasts and adjustments later I had the desired results.

I created three Layers for rendering. The rendering was all done with the hardware renderer and motion blur. One for the Map. One for the big particles and one for the small particles.

Render times in HD720 were 3 secs per frame on my oldschool trash machine. Hardware renderer kicks ass.

After the rendering was done I imported the sequences in Fusion and started the compositing.



Nothing special here. Just adjusted the map to get rid of the saturation and give it a blueish look.
The paricle layers received a glow and a color correction to make them brighter, a little bit yellowish and adjusted the transparency.
Hardest part was the monitorlook. It always looked like a paper on a monitor so I also multiplied a ramp on top of it. Works pretty well, reflections would be better. But I am here for the particles, not a perfect compositing.

Original Eureka Shot as aired

My remade Version of the Shot

Hope you enjoy. Have fun.
Garry Runke
www.vfxjay.com