The goal of this project was to explore my passions for Stop Motion Animation and traditional 3D animation by creating a stylized character with a Stop Motion Animation aesthetic.
I am a huge fan of animation that explores a Scottish folklore aesthetic such as Brave and How to Train your Dragon. When I came across the concept art for this druid by Reuben Tan, I was excited to bring his character to life in 3D. My goal was to use his concept as inspiration and explore my passion for a stop-motion style, specifically by creating a handmade, miniature feel to the character in the shading and groom.
Reference Page
For the groom, I wanted to create thick, tactile hairs. I learned a lot about Houdini's grooming system on this project. For the skin, I wanted to create a plastic resin skin texture to resemble 3d-printed stop-motion characters. All of the details on the wood and leaves are hand-painted. For the stylized wind magic and grass, I referenced a lot of felt and cotton materials as inspiration. I tried to think a lot about how these stylized effects would be created if they were made on a traditional stop-motion project and used that as inspiration.
Technologies Used: Zbrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Houdini, Redshift, Nuke
Turntable
Still Renders
Topology and Hair Guides
Animation
Body Rig and Facial Rig built in Maya using mGear, ngSkinTools, and Comet (in progress)
Crowds Simulation Overview
Crowds Agent Example Node Network
Overview Setup Node Network
Viewport View
Crowds Simulation Exploration using Houdini's Crowd's System
With this exploration, I wanted to explore using Houdini for crowd simulations. I imagined a scenario where human soldiers have invaded the druid's homeland, and a war breaks out. I learned a lot about how to use Houdini's crowd's system for a 3d animation pipeline by setting up agents, variations, rigs, animations, and interactions within the environment.
Stylized Render Tool
With this exploration, I wanted to create my own stylized render tool. Recently, I've been super inspired by what I have seen from Artineering's Flair System, which inspired me to want to try to build my own. The tool was written in C++. First the tool applies a stylized blur based on the Kuwahara algorithm. Then it applies a pointillism technique that was inspired loosely by hatching techniques. Lastly, it adds edge detection based on the Sobel Edge detection algorithm to bring back details into the render. Currently, the renders are batch-processed through the tool. For production use, my goal is to have this running in-engine similar to Artineering's approach in Maya, such as by modifying the tool to function in Houdini with VEX, or by creating a custom gizmo in Nuke to allow for more flexibility in post-production.