SECRET LEVEL: SCENE RECREATION

In this article, I’ll break down the process of reconstructing a scene from the Secret Level animated series (Episode 8), exploring the techniques used in modeling, texturing, lighting, and animation to match the show’s signature style. Final result:

The reason I wanted to recreate this shot is to get to know Houdini. So the first thing I did was creating a smoke sim. Three days of tweaking parameters and I got this:

The fundamental sim concept is to scatter points and use them as emission sources for a pyro simulation, where each point holds its own smoke particle (volume data) that interact with fluid dynamics forces and other particles. More scattered points equals denser smoke equals more compute power consumption. I found that ~400k points were sufficient in my case

Main Houdini sim tree and insides of Solver1 node

High poly for the cigarette was made in Zbrush, texturing — in Substance

For the snowfall I used footage I shot recently. Got lucky with the lighting here. Was able to split one footage in two: for background and foreground using color ramp so the brighter the snow on the footage the closer it to the camera in the scene

Person in the background is just a simple cloth sim done in Marvelous Designer

For the ground I used 3 different material layers to make the transparency/color variation, but as I used eevee to render this, most of the transparency/subsurface scattering details were lost sadly

The scene was assembled in Blender, post-processed in Resolve (chromatic aberration was added as well as grain to get rid of color banding)

The real mystery to me is how they achieved this kind of details on the snow — the thing really sells the shot. Was it a Houdini sim also, a high density mesh with layers and layers of displacement or something else?

Here you can see cigarette's model and textured details up close