Octopus Crawling on the car and breaking the windshield glass is a CGI work
Claim
BREAKING: State of Emergency declared in New York City due to Mass flooding. Be careful where you park your car.
Rating
Explanation
In the viral 17-second video we see a brown octopus crawling on the car parking. Suddenly, the octopus climbs over a white sedan car, and while it moves towards the top the windshield glass gets broken. This video was shared by the user which garnered around 237.1K views, 1230 likes, and more than 400 reposts. Some users even went on to warn with messages like “The apocalyptic NewYorkfloods have brought up all sorts of new animals from the sewers to the surface.” This same viral clip was shared by many other users on social media platforms connecting it with the recent NewYork floods can be seen here and here. Come, let’s check this scary claim.
#Alert : State of Emergency declared in New York City due to Mass flooding. Be careful where you park your car.#NewYork 🇺🇲 #flooding #flood #rain #heavyrain #LatestNews #latest #latest #Weather #WeatherUpdate #WeatherForecast #BREAKING #BREAKING_NEWS #USA pic.twitter.com/Jti7ilUi7X
— upuknews (@upuknews1) September 30, 2023
What’s the truth?
When we started our research while having a closer look at the viral clip we noticed that some writings in black color read as @ghost3dee are written at the bottom side. We took that as a cue and investigated through all the social media platforms with similar usernames. Finally, we found an Instagram page namely “ghost3dee” with the same viral video uploaded on 25 September 2023. This means this video was posted before the New York floods. Also, his bio describes him as a Qatar-based CG generalist, which is more than enough to prove that the viral video is computer-generated imagery.
Moreover, the caption of the video says that “When you park like a jackass, a giant alien octopus comes and crushes your car.
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Another Churro sim that I’ve been putting on the back burner for a while combines several solvers and techniques, including nested point deforms, fake RBD vellum tricks, and a massive exploitation of vellum constraints. Tet fiber constraints were used to compress tentacles and crush the proxy soft body car that hinges and shakes on 4 static wheels.
Again, I didn’t use a single keyframe in the entire scene and kept everything procedural. I’ve learned a lot about sim checkpoints to help avoid resimming the entire timeline just for a small change that needs to happen late in the sim.
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Although some parts of the sim were challenging, the most time was spent on the compositing stage. I lost faith in AE for the past few years and did most of the stuff in Nuke, which is a major change in my personal pipeline. AE started to remind me of Max with countless bloated plugins upon plugins that make the software crash because of incompatibilities when used together.”
This clearly proves that the video is the work of animation and not a real one.
When we searched further we got the same viral video uploaded as YouTube shorts in a channel namely ‘ghost3dee’on the same date as 25 September 2023.
When we looked into his YouTube description box it read as ‘VFX Artist, father of Churro – the CGI octopus. Houdini tutorials coming this fall’ located in Qatar.
So the above all evidence clearly proves that the viral video showing an octopus is a CG work.
Conclusion:
Thus we conclude that the viral clip with octopus climbing and breaking a car’s windshield is an animation work. This video has no connection with neither the New York floods nor any real octopus.
