Joel Kidangan's Rookies 2024

Hi, welcome to my rookies entry for 2024,

The first project I'll be breaking down is my Digital double!

Digital double - Self portrait

Photogrammetry Scan

The first step before I did anything on this project is getting a good scan. We used photogrammetry and did multiple tests until a workable result was achieved. The software used for this is Agisoft Metashape.

Modelling/Wrap

After the scan is done I wrapped a clean mesh around the scan. In order to do this I selected important landmarks on the scan and the clean mesh. It isn't so simple though as wrapping on a scan doesnt really give a very clean result, it just sets the major proportions. Following this was the hard and most time consuming part of the digital double- The cleanup. 

For the eyes in particular the important details were to ensure a uniform width around the eyelid, A loop that goes around the eyelid (This helps create the waterline which gives the eyes a wetness while reacting to light), and a sharp trailing edge around the eyelid.

Groom

My hair is long, and messy. It may have been easier to take care of my hair regularly but you know what they say- gotta stick to the reference.

In order to do long messy hair I had to follow a layered approach. This entails building each section of hair individually and observing their shapes. While doing so I noticed lots of interesting features of hair, like how some strands curl into each other, fold over each other and are dragged back by virtue of a hairband. I also tried to match the Fringes and starting roots as in my reference

Texturing/Lookdev

Ah the only time I'm happy I don't have a good skincare routine. Since we shot in winter I got to focus on the tearing of skin, drying up, discoloration and blackheads. 

For the eyelids it was important to make sure the texturing of the tear duct transitions well with the sclera.

For the displacement a mixture of mDisp and zDisp was used to achieve the result along with rough and shiny specular to capture the micro details along with the large scale imperfections. These were merged primarily in mari itself so I could view everything quickly.

As mentioned above I used two different types of displacement along with rough and shiny specular to achieve the look. The project was rendered in Renderman.

Clothing

The trenchcoat was done within marvellous designer, Textured in substance and shaded in maya

Final Comped Renders 

And here it is, months of hard work and scrutiny in three images. Hope you like it!

Slay Frog

As a part of the end of our third year project we were required to make a 30 second short film in teams of eight. Our short is titled slay frog. As is apparent by this point, it's about a frog that consumes a whole bunch of protein powder. 

I was primarily responsible for the texturing, lighting and compositing aspects of this project and will be going a bit more in depth regarding my workflow below!

The slay frog project consisted of three hero assets and coincidentally I was also in charge of lighting and compositing for four of their shots.

Normal Frog

For the normal frog, we decided to go for a red eyed tree frog.

While texturing this asset the major question to answer was how would this asset look on an anthropomorphic version.

After analysing the reference I had to find a way to recreate it, staying true to the frog patterns and features but compensating for the anthromorphism we noticed.

Additionally I was also responsible for Lighting and compositing this asset in a shot

The eyes weren't behaving as we'd like them to due to refraction, that entailed reprojecting the eyes in Nuke.

Apart from this the grass opening would be very expensive to do in 3D and so using lightgroups I recreated it in Nuke.  

The cliff was created by cheating perspective and therefore it was very important to make sure the asset still looked correct with lighting and compositing

Muscle Frog

The muscle frog, though while in theory should've just been the same frog but, well, bigger- it posed it's own set of challenges. exaggerating the frog scales to the point that it's visible without looking like a completely different species, adding in the veins with a whole bunch of SSS and experimenting with a fine balance between sss and translucency to get the gummy look on the arms and legs.

The lookdev for this asset was also done by me and I was responsible to ensure it looked good in all angles

Additionally, you guessed it! I worked on the lighting and compositing for this shot!

Sally the snake

For the snake the vector displacement was all done by my teammate (Meaning I did not sculpt the scales that was all my fabulous team member)

I personally was responsible for the texturing and lookdev and making sure the snake matched the references. In order to match the physically visible iridiscent range I decided to paint thin film thickness maps in mari after sampling the values that gave me the effect I needed on different sections

Compositing played a major role in these shots, in relighting and then dilating the eyes. Adding in saliva strands that were too expensive to do in 3D and tweaking the light groups to achieve the look we wanted.

All in all the year has been eventful. I got to work on a lot of fun projects at ESMA and learnt a lot too. All in all these were the highlights of my rookies this year. See you on the next one!