DUST & ROCKS VFX
HOUDINI
All of the dust and pebble VFX were created in Houdini. I imported the animated rover alembics for each shot, and isolated the the rover wheels to be used as emitters.
For the dust, I created a particle system to control the volume and direction of the dust, which I then plugged into a pyro solver to get the dusty look, and exported into Autodesk Maya as VDBS.
For the kicked-up rocks, I created a similar particle system with fewer particles to control the emission of the rocks. I then procedurally modeled a small rock and used a copy to points node so that an instance of the rock would follow every particle. I exported the rock effect into Autodesk Maya as an Alembic
PROCEDURAL GROUND PLANE MATERIAL
ADOBE SUBSTANCE DESIGNER & SUBSTANCE PAINTER
For the ground plane, we wanted a combination of salt flats with a dusty martian look. To accomplish this, I procedurally created a salt flat-like material in Substance Designer using a cell noise texture to divide the ground into individual flats. I then proceeded to use this cell noise texture as a mask to isolate the ground itself from the cracks so that I could apply different textures, heights, levels of roughness, and color. The material was tiled in Substance Painter across multiple UDIMS to get the seamless look
