Category: Exploratory Practice – Group Project

So I asked my friend for his critique of our group project and this is what he had to say:

• In general, the scene can have more contrast in the desert scene, but I’m not sure if it’s your intended art direction, just my personal pref to have darker shadows 

Role: Director, Producer, VFX, Look Dev, Animation (except robot), Lighting & Rendering
Special Thanks to my Colleague, Chen Xuan for the camera animation guidance

For the idea of this project, we did it together as a group as we thought of what all of us wanted to do. TianHang wants to do modelling for robots. Yanghao (Chris) wanted abstraction with the involvement of animals/creatures. I was eager to explore the complex setup of simulating abstract plants and interesting VFX CGI. Choplat (Chay) wants to do post-production and sound design.

So knowing what we all wanted, we looked for references and came up with this story (script below). Hence, it contains what everyone wants to do.

For this project, I think the bulk of the work is on VFX as almost every shot contains some elements of CGI. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to create the setup so that the geometry that is exported from Houdini would look more natural and at the same time with a hint of abstraction.

Also did the animatics (see earlier post).

Lighting and Rendering are also quite straightforward, as it was a desert scene and we did not have too many objects to obstruct the illumination of our main subjects, we just used an HDRI to light the scene.

Making of Video

References

References

Story & Storyboard

RnD

Link to our board, welcome to explore.

Logo Design

Ai Generated

To help the group understand the whole plan of the story, Chay and I put up this animation with early VFX tests and simple geometry.

So Chris had the scene built in UE5 ready to be rendered, so I blended two deer animation data together with Houdini’s KineFX and used that deer geometry to layer FX simulations on the deer.

For this video there is two layers of animations on two parts of the deer.

Firstly, I want the focus to be on the horns of the deer so I split out the body and the horns of the deer.

Secondly, I started with the vines simulation, starting from the legs as it travel upwards towards the horns.

Since the horns are already separated from the body, I can manually time when I want the vine simulation to start on the horns. This setup gives me more control to art direct the vines’ animation.

Once the vines are done, the leaves are just copied to a fraction of the points on the vines. They are also animated to move along the curves of the vines to give them a more complex look to the deer.

Originally, the idea was to have animated plants spreading across the landscape.

However, due to the lack of time and resources (we were running late for our deadline as we had other assignments to submit), we just had static plants already covering the landscape and just animated their hue with a custom AOV in post-production.

The initial design and simulation above for the plant, but we think it was too flimsy and looked too fruity (similar to grapes). So we decided to go with another design whereby the plant is more flowery and vine-like.

False colour showing the bloom time offset.

At the initial start of the s04b, the paints will be added from the previous shot, and the hairs will be replaced with grass and plants

Final Product

The VFX here consists of particle simulation for the initial magical pollination seeds.

Then I added a vine simulation for the grown of the plants.

What VFX is in this shot?

Firstly, there is a ground deformation relative to the impact site of the rocket.

Then, there is the debris at the impact site.

Lastly, there is a smoke simulation.

No problems just normal workflow