When you work on a gore shot at a studio, most of the time you will have to match the effect to the timing of the shot, as well as your supervisor's vision. Here are some tips that can help you do that.

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Should You Cover The Character’s Face?

This is a hard take when it comes to gore effects. Depending on where the blood and various other fluids are coming from.

Usually, for any effect it’s a good rule of thumb for any effect to never cover the character’s face. Covering a face or the front of a character can draw attention away from the main focus of the scene. For example, if a conversation is taking place, you probably don’t want to have a dust cloud pass in front of the character while they are talking. It can hide what the character is saying, and muddle the expression of the dialogue being delivered.

But what should you do if you are simulating a head explosion, or a character vomiting blood?

The direction of the splatter matters. If it’s coming towards the camera, then at some point it will obscure the character. You just have to choose where it should be. Generally, it's good to keep the splatter away from the character’s eyes. Eyes are where most of the emotion of the face is conveyed, besides the mouth. Since the mouth is one of the many holes of the body where blood can come from, you can probably count that as an emitter of fluid.

Another reason for avoiding covering a character’s eyes is that the lights from the scene can reflect off of them, which will assist in adding a deeper emotion to the character’s expressions. If your gore effect is leading up to a character passing away, you probably also want their last expression to add to the shock factor of it all.

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Body Placement of Blood Splatter

Should you make the gore look artistic? Well that’s really up to your supervisor.

Placement matters with gore effects. If a character’s shoulder is emitting blood, then you probably want the blood dripping down the character’s shoulder. However, the majority of the notes you receive might be towards how the blood drips down the character’s arm. Depending on the theme of your production, a general random smear might be alright, or perhaps you might need some artistically controlled blood streams around the arm muscles.

If the purpose of the shot and the sequence is to show how the injury will impact the character overtime then you’ll probably have to keep that in mind while creating your blood setup. You’ll need to make sure you can have controls in your setup so you can control the emission of the blood, and the continuity in the overall sequence. The more injured the character is, the longer the blood trail down the arm is going to be.

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If a character is talking with fluid leaking out of its mouth, you probably want to be careful with how the fluid impacts the character’s words, and how it flows over the mouth. You will have to be careful on meshing issues with particle fluids. Meshing issues can include uv, normal, uneven thickness in geometry, and incorrect motion blur. These issues can distract from the words being spoken in the scene.

You probably also need the fluid being emitted to flow in relation to the amount of force that is causing it to be emitted. More force and action means more globular splatter, as well as larger amounts. Less force will equate to a smaller stream trickling and hugging the character’s facial features. This concept can also be applied to other features of the body as well.

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Holes.

How should I add holes to something?

Let’s say you have a character that has an item blasted through it, or is impacted by bullet holes. Where should those holes be, and how should they look?

Well, sometimes bullet holes in characters are added in comp as a 2D effect, or as stock 2D elements that the department might have on hand. However, if you have to tackle them in 3D, you’ll have to keep note of how many objects are impacting the character, and how and where the geometry collides with the character. You also need to think about how lighting will approach lighting the now exposed internal sections of the body.

If you are working with two sets of animation. One containing the character anim, and the other the colliding object, you’ll most likely need to create a color visualizer to show the location of impact. You can do this by making one object white, the other another color, and then using an Attribute Transfer SOP between the two. The radius of impact is always going to be slightly larger than the size of the object due to the speed of impact.
Wherever a character is impacted by an object, their body will always be forced away in the opposite direction. After the impact has slowed down, the body of the character will start to react to the injury. This might mean collapsing due to the size of it, tightening or stiffening to hold the injury in place, or skin flaps dropping down to cover the hole.

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Rule of thumb for holes:

Don’t over think them: Assess your shot. Check to see if it’s a close up shot of a wound or far away. You don’t need to rebuild the human internal system organ for organ within the wound. You can just create a basic crumbled mesh, and layer some blood over it. Or anything else that is needed.

Keep them away from the edges/outline of your character: Adding bullet holes that hit the edges of your character’s shoulders or legs is pretty inconvenient. Only do this unless explicitly told to do so. If you do this you are adding more work to your setup, and you’ll have to account that blasting away part of the character outline will cause more bone, tendons, and muscle flaps to appear.

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Timing is Everything:

Especially in Dark Comedic Effects

Depending on the production you are working on, you might have to create a system for the fluid splatter or gory elements to emit and move on specific shot beats.

Blood generally times its release from the body based on the heart rate of the person. Every second or so artery blood can spurt out. Blood being released from the veins will flow out in a slower manner.

In productions such as The Boys, gore is used in a comedic manner. Several gory explosions through the seasons are timed against character reactions and moments that lean into more relaxing or juxtaposing tones. Such as the infamous first episode scene of season three, and the head explosions in season two.

The head explosion scene is a great example of dark comedy. The first explosion goes off, and then the rest slowly ramp up as the surrounding characters become more panicked. The splatter also has a great dynamic timing of how it interacts with the other elements and characters in the scene. The effects were clearly timed with the plate, and art directed in a way where it still maintains the gravity of the situation and adds an element of comedy.


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