2024 Portfolio

Effects, Lighting and Compositing

Burning Tree

Responsible for all elements; except the tree models and Materials, which were Quixel Assets.

All elements were rendered using Arnold in Houdini and composited together in Nuke using AOV passes to get control over the effect of the various lights in the scene.

FX

Lighting and Compositing

The Ground

The ground geometry is being deformed by a heightfield, which was created in Nuke from the Plate to match the shape of the rocks, sticks and grass and catch light shadows more accurately. The grass was Generated using a custom procedural set-up in Houdini, which generates points around the trees with masks for length, burnt grass and random variation. Grass blade Geometry is then scattered onto the points, inheriting the attributes for their shape and then animated using 3D noise to match the wind in the scene.

Tree Ember and Flame at Night Reference

Unfortunately due to the nature of the effect, most of the available references where poor-quality footage, shot on a phone.

Procedural Modelling

Pineapple Generator Tool

As a part of my research into Procedural Modelling techniques, I developed a tool to generate Geometry and Masks of Pineapple Assets, with variations of different elements, ready for rendering with high and low poly variations. The values in the control panel are used inside a subnet to control the parameters of various nodes with restrictions on the values to prevent broken geometry.

Controlling Variation

Inside the Subnet the node tree is separated into different stages and parts, this allows for changes to be made to individual elements without affecting others. The stages are broken up into: the base shape, matching the profile, height and width.  This then undergoes a Voronoi fracture treatment to make the Base for the Pineapple chunk shape. These Voronoi pieces are cleaned up to remove any unwanted geometry/points. the cleaned-up geometry is then split into two parts, the spikes and the segments underneath. The leaves are created separately by scattering lines onto a deformed sphere and using a sweep node to create the leaf shape.  All elements are then subdivided and utilise poly extrude nodes, noise displacement in VOPs and mask generation along the way. This means the hi-poly version is created separately from the low-poly version allowing switching for more efficient changing of parameters.

Pineapple Reference

Procedural Cobblestone Street

This project utilized a similar workflow to the Pineapple, using art directable a Voronoi Fracture system with intentionally placed points. The line of rectangular bricks was created intentionally as a "drain" to catch water, this is done by using a curve to generate a grid of points in that area to use for the Voronoi fracture, whereas all other bricks use a more random shape. Rendered with Mantra, each cobblestone has a unique ID attribute and various masks generated by the generation process; this allows to give each stone various levels of variation in details. The grass is a simple hairgen turned into flat geometry using a sweep node and the sticks are lines that were rayed onto the ground and then, using a detangle node, intersecting geometry was amended to stack the sticks on top of each other.

Tavern Assets

Here is a selection of more Procedural Modelling work, the Tavern Assets are made using procedural workflows that allow for infinite variation and are all destruction-ready too, with separate pieces of geometry for each part of the assets.  Unlike the other work in this post, these assets Utilise UVs and shaders made with Substance Painter.

Kiwi Fruit

The Kiwi fruit Asset was another houdini Procedural model with mantra shaders made using masks from the model creation process. It utilises hair Generation for the skin and transparency masks for the holes where the seeds are. Balancing the transparency with SSS, colours and roughness was the most challenging aspect of this project.

Kiwi Reference