Amanda Kutcher 2024 Rookies Submission

Evade

I was inspired by League of Legends 2019 Cinematic "Awaken", the Jhin and Camille sequence. I began my journey with this project in Maya to block out camera movements, character animation, and environment (character model and rig from Adrian Lambert via Gumroad). Then, I moved into Houdini to create the explosion, dust, debris, and magical tendril effects. I also created an HDA vine tool in Houdini that allows artist to both procedurally and artistically craft vines onto any surface. This tool allowed me to efficiently add to the environment and make the piece feel more complete. Lighting was a fun challenge for me to tackle in this project as I wanted to maintain a strong silhouette of the character while not losing details in darks of the project. Once I got renders through Houdini Redshifts render engine, I passed my AOV's into Nuke where I compiled all my elements to push the colors in a cohesive and artistic manner. 

Fire's Wrath

I got the stock footage from pexels.com (https://www.pexels.com/video/an-abandoned-house-interior-12992123/)  and turned it from a day scene to a night scene in Nuke. Then, I used 3D Equalizer to track stock footage and capture camera movements. 3D Equalizer also allowed me to use my tracked points to digitally recreate the environment and turned the points into geometry. Once I had the environment and camera matched, I went into Houdini to create the fire and RBD effects. I had rendered 6 separate sims of fire in Arnold Houdini that I compiled into nuke to match the elements to the back plate. This project challenged me technically since this is the first project I had tracked footage and integrated the renders into a cohesive piece. In Houdini, this was also a technically challenging project for me since I had interacting simulations to make sure the falling block is impacting the velocities and movements of the fire. 

Area 51

I got the stock footage from pexels.com and put it into After Effects using the content aware fill tool to create a clean plate to track. Once I got the clean plate, I put it into 3D Equlizer where I took the tracked points and created a geometry that would later become the environment. In Houdini, I boolean geometry I was gong to simulate the sinkhole. Using RBD constraints and vellum grains had a learning curve, but I am happy with the results. I animated the car in Maya using the motion paths tool to control the speed and direction the car was driving in. Then, I used a combination of geometry and point constraints so the car would stick to the ground. This allowed me to work procedurally if I decide to alter the path or speed of the car. Once I had the RBD simulation of the sink hole finalized, I merged the animation of the car with the RBD sim of the car falling into the hole.  I got the textures for the environment by projecting the backplate onto the ground in the Karma lops render and seamlessly color corrected in Nuke.

Thank you for taking the time to look at my Rookies Submission! 

These three pieces are the culmination of my work from Gnomon as I have recently graduated. When I started at school, I had not done computer graphics and I am so proud of my growth as an artist. I am excited to perpetually be a student of the craft as I start my journey into the industry.