Bridgeport Production Week 4-6

I continued to work with Bianca Rawlings and Aelma Azad over several weeks developing assets for a 3d scene based on concept art. It was refreshing to work on a new collaborative 3D project since the wrap of my thesis film.

Fish Prop Model

After boarding out a short story to pair with the concept art we decided to create a hero asset fish for the character on the boat to interact with to give an emotional heart to the short story. We picked a golden arowana fish because we liked the colors and how the texture matched with the overall mood and shape motifs in the concept art.

Reference and Concept

Modeling

Houdini Scale Generation

Generating the scales in Houdini was by far the most difficult part of the process. I originally attempted to model scales in Maya using Quad-draw as well as duplicating scales and using a wrap deformer. I found that neither method gave me the desired result. I started looking in to Houdini which gave me some promising results. I wanted to create scales that meshed together well with tight overlaps and were distributed evenly. I distributed the simple scale geometry along the UV space. I had to play with the settings for a while to get them to have a stylized 3D depth to them. I also worked on making sure they were rotated in the correct direction and the distribution was packed in a way that resembled my reference materials. While the geometry came out high poly, I would like to try to either use the scale meshes as high poly geometry to bake into the low poly fish normal map, or retopologize them to be very low poly. Some of the scales I decided to adjust by hand in ZBrush to make sure they looked and flowed correctly as well. I had a lot of fun experimenting in Houdini. This was my first successful Houdini project made since taking a Dynamic Simulation class several years ago.

Sculpting

I really enjoyed sculpting the details on the face and the fins. The scales still need a bit of adjustment but I'm quite happy with the overall result so far.

Water / Lighting Tests

I created some brief water and lighting tests to see if I could recreate waves in Maya/Arnold and get the lighting to look similar to the concept art. I think eventually I was pretty successful, however, we still had to tackle how to get the water to move in a believable fashion and how we would stylize the effect.