Raquel Minguillón - VFX Student

Hi everyone! I’m Raquel Minguillón Fernández, and I’m finishing my VFX master's at FX Barcelona Film School. During my time here, I discovered my passion for Vellum, grooming, and crowd simulations. I am excited to present my student reel, which I have developed over these two years of learning. As a first-time participant in the Rookies, I am thrilled to share my work here. So, let’s dive right in! Below are descriptions of some of the projects included in my reel.

|Project: The Concert

Working on this project has been a lot of fun. I wanted to recreate every single detail and make people feel the exact same energy that you experience at a concert. To achieve that, I focused my skills on the lighting to create that environment. 

·Process:

I modeled and textured the walkway, the sign at the top of the stage, and the screens on each side. For the screens, I animated and rendered two different cameras before the final shot, using that render to create an animated texture to replace the screens.

I used 16 characters from Mixamo and animated all of them there. With Houdini, I mixed some of the animations to create diverse combinations and bring more variety to the crowd. Moreover, I organized the people into three different groups to focus their attention on different parts of the stage, making it all more realistic.

Talking about the lighting, I used many lights placed in spots visible in the frame and one HDRI to fill everything. The fog is also rendered in Houdini, so I had to link or unlink the lights to create that foggy atmosphere and avoid lighting up the whole scene.

Everything is rendered with Houdini Karma.

·Basic Nuke composition:

To achieve the final atmosphere, I used Nuke for the final edit. 

|Project: Cushion

For this project, I wanted to experiment with Vellum parameters to better understand each one. 

·Process:

To create the stitches, I made two groups by drawing curves to select the points of both grids. Then, I used Vellum Weld Points to connect them. The rocks were also made with Vellum; I used the Shape Match node to create realistic movement without losing the original shape of the rock. The mass of the rocks is high because I wanted the cloth to sink deeper .

The grid has a lot of subdivisions (275,000 primitives on each 10x10 grid) because I wanted to achieve detailed cloth, especially around the stitches. I applied a POP Wind to create some movement and make the simulation more interesting.

The textures of the cloth were generated in Substance Painter using a procedural workflow.

Everything is rendered with Houdini Mantra.

|Project: Fictional opening titles

I had to create this project for the first trimester using Houdini. The school told us to take a main title as a reference and replicateit as closely as possible. In my case, I choose the intro of “Wednesday”, for the shot of the stairs.

The most interesting aspect of this project is the stairs. It was my first time developing a procedural object in Houdini, which presented a challenge. I researched information from various tutorials on YouTube and I tried to incorporate that knowledge into my shot. I created a simple tool that anyone can use in their projects. It allows you to adjust the height and width of the steps, walls, and railings individually. 

·Basic Nuke techniques: 

|Project: Circus tiger

It was my first time recreating animal fur, and I have to admit that I thought it was a tedious process, but I enjoyed all of it. 

·Tiger study

Firstly, I searched for a lot of tiger images, after that research, I selected the best ones and I studied the position and the length of the hair.

·Process

For the fur, I used masks to control the length, clumps, and density of the hair. All the processes are procedural, which allows for easy and quick adjustments if needed. I refined the masks and played with the parameters until I achieved the most realistic appearance. 

About the lookdev, I tried to focus the attention to the tiger and send that loneliness and sadness that such animals endure in such awful situations.

Everything is rendered with Houdini Karma.

·Basic Nuke techniques:

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