Caterpillar Project, a The Last of Us inspired clip

Felix Fegeilson handled the sculpt, groom, shading, animation and rendering of the animation.
Nathan Dubuc handled the environment, lighting and compositing.

These images are the main references used for the project.
The Last of Us, and its iconic menu screen was the main inspiration for the environment.

Initial concept for the project

Because the groom of the caterpillar was made in Houdini, we had to render the whole caterpillar in Houdini because we couldn't find a way to export the groom from Houdini that wouldn't make the asset obscenely heavy.
This means that we had to combine the Environment, rendered in Arnold Maya, with the caterpillar, rendered in Houdini Karma. We did that in compositing.

This process went out surprisingly smoothly, the only challenge being the USDs exported from Maya, which once imported in Houdini had vastly different camera and light properties. We simply re-adjusted everything by hand to match the Arnold render.

The environment was made and rendered in Maya.
Every asset except for the backpack and the books (which are models from the internet) were modeled in Maya.
Some of the vegetation debris on the floor were also made with photogrammetry.

For the first shot, the moss in the background was made using photographs of actual elements of real life moss.

These were then isolated in Photoshop, and normal maps were made using Photoshop filters.

Each element was then turned into a card in Blender, where each card was scattered on a plane.

The leaf was made using the same process, taking a photo of a real-life leaf and turning it into a normal map in Photoshop.

Compositing did a lot of the heavy lifting of the project.
Karma and Arnold renders were combined, and the lens effect really do a lot to give the project its esthetic.
PxfZDefocus node was used for the bokeh blur, which allowed for more natural looking bloom and bokeh than the native ZDefocus in Nuke.

As a final word, we want to thank our teachers at VFX-Workshop for helping us out on this project.
Special thanks to Edin Hadzic for helping with the environment and lighting.