How It Ends: Breakdown

Here it is, the breakdown of our fx for How It Ends!  I lit all the lightning and pyroclastic shots shown, as well as the one helicopter.  It took a few months but worth it in the end.  All was done in Houdini using Redshift for the renderer.  I did light comps in Nuke.  For the lightning sequence I lit with all the lightning on so performance could be tweaked and hammered out in comp.  Creative control was given to me for some of the lightning and cloud placement.  Lights were placed deep inside the pyroclastic cloud wall to simulate lava illumination coming from within.  Lots of dust!