Tiphanie Chong - Cauldron and Tomatoes

Hello everyone,

I am currently a VFX student at Astro Heart Academy, and I'd like to share two projects I worked on last year. 

While I still have much to learn, I'm excited to participate in the Rookie 2024 competition and showcase what I've accomplished over the year. Thank you to my mentor Sunny for all the support. 

I look forward to seeing how I will grow and improve in the coming year!

Cauldron

Personal Project | December, 2023

In this assignment, we were given free rein in what we were allowed to do. The only requirement was to compose it in a 4K square still image.

During that time, I was engrossed with Hogwarts Legacy a game set in the Harry Potter world (A series where I'm an avid fan). This made me want to create a scene that had magical elements in it.

After some great deliberation, I decided that I wanted a cauldron as my focal point.

Once I decided magic as my motif I explored what other elements fill up a wizard's brewery room.

After some research on Pinterest, I found that many of them had bookshelves, potion ingredients, photo frames, candles (I ended up replacing candles with a lantern to not steal away the focus from the cauldron), and a treasure box.

Some even had skulls lying around the room but since I didn't want to make a haunting room I decided against it.

I tried different approaches (close-up, wide angle, top-down shots, etc.) for my layout but always kept the focus on the cauldron.

I want the scene to be set on a midnight stage, so I used blue and purple directional light to create a moonlit ambiance. 


There are also some fire-lit objects (i.e. the fire and the lantern) in the room. Their bounce light should fill the room with red in contrast to the moonlit setting. 


However, the redness emitted by the fire felt too intense, so I softened the red by incorporating atmospheric fog and additional moonlit lighting. 


Finally, since the cauldron is my main focal point, I emphasized it by applying a green mystical light to light up the space.

Texturing the scroll was quite the interesting process.

Since I wanted the scroll to have a mysterious vibe, I decided against using English text. Instead, I shammed some "magic potion creation steps" text and translated it into Hebrew. I applied the text onto the scroll to mimic ancient magic language. I'm unable to verify the accuracy of the translation but it looked mysterious and cryptic.

Once completed, I imported the text into Substance Painter as alpha resources in my library. By doing it this way, I could efficiently reuse them for all my other paper assets.

To create an antiquated sense for the scroll, I applied grunge stains on the opacity channel to replicate the shredded paper edge.

*Fire*

I used EmberGen to create the fire under the cauldron.

As this was my very first time using EmberGen, I was thoroughly impressed. Just simply starting with a preset and importing my firewood model as an emitter I was already halfway done. I only had to tweak and tune some parameters and I was able to get the result that I desired.

Afterwards, I exported it as a VBD file and imported into Maya. I then applied the aiMatte shader so that I could extract just the fire underneath the cauldron. This allowed me to better flexibility to composite the fire in After Effects.

*Smoke & Particles*

As this is a still image instead of a video, I decided to use footage videos instead of simulating the smoke.

I used two smoke video footage (White Smoke Drawing Thin Shapeless Lines In Darkness In 4K, Smoke On A Black Background) and one particle video footage (Floating Golden Dust Particles) from Videezy.com.

Tomatoes

Texturing Exercise | January, 2023

"Tomatoes" was a 5 day assignment where the theme was "food". After selecting tomato as my subject matter, I was captivated by Brent Hofacker's "Organic Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes". I wanted to simulate the same vivid colour variations he captured from the tomatoes.

I found this particular assignment quite entertaining. To fully capture the essence of freshness was particularly unique since I had to always find the balance between shininess and applying water. Furthermore, to imitate life meant that no two tomatoes were the same. Each tomato had its unique pattern and redness.

Despite being a short assignment, I have come to appreciate the art of sub-surfacing. It was an indispensable tool that was necessary to create fresh and juicy tomatoes. I thoroughly enjoyed my time working on this assignment.

In hindsight, I should have checked the UV mapping before applying the textures. Quite a few issues arose during the assignment I was able to luckily fix them in After Effects. 

However, not all issues were resolved and some were still present afterwards. An issue that becomes quite evident is when the tomatoes and the material balls are placed side by side. The UVs on the tomatoes will unwrap differently than the material balls. 

If I were to redo this assignment, I would definitely check that my UV mappings are done correctly before moving on to the next step.

All the best to everyone, and thank you for reading! 

Although I don't have much to share this year, I've truly enjoyed what I've learned, and I'm confident I'll have much more to showcase next year!

Have a wonderful day🧡