"Moon Struck" is a 15-week team animation project that was completed under the guidance of DreamWorks artists for the Summer Industry Course 2022 at Texas A&M University.
Look Development - Character Groom & Texturing (All Aspects); Polaroid Camera, Crayons, and Glass Jars
Modeling - Rubik's Cube, Glass Bottles, Glass Jars
Software Used: Adobe Suite, Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Substance Suite, and RenderMan
Created by Alyssa Curran, Anna Berry, Andrea Soto, Gabrielle Gonzalez, Toby Johnson, and Van Anh Pham.
Character Look Development
Look Development & Grooming Turntable of Wolf Character
Character Callout Sheet
My workflow began by determining the look for the wolf's fur and gathering references. The wolf character is a cute stuffed animal that's often played with and left in a girl's treehouse overnight. Since he is frequently handled, his fur appears uneven and slightly messy, with noticeable spots where he's been held and played with.
The fur groom includes both short fur for the body and long fur for the cheek tufts. I used a blend of Maya, XGen, Houdini, & RenderMan to achieve this look. Fortunately a team member happened to own the top left reference, which was incredibly helpful for me to study what the different lengths of fur look like on the stuffed animal!
Fur Concept Art
Concept by Andrea Soto
The concept art helped me understand the directionality, length, and colors of the fur. Following the direction of stuffed animal's fur was important in achieving a believable look. Having a guide for the cheek tufts of how long the fur is also helped when designing the cheek tufts in Houdini.
Character Look Development - Body Groom (Short Fur)
My technical workflow included utilizing Houdini's hair grooming tools to create the short fur. I created density masks of areas with different fur. I also used an attribute by map node to load in the color information from Substance Painter to Houdini.
To achieve a soft look to the fur, I used clumping, lift, bend, and frizz modifiers to the fur. The first image showcases the fur without any modifiers, which I noticed the fur was very even and stiff. Adding in the clumping modifiers, added variety to the fur and a softer look. The clumping also helped create little flyaway hairs on the ears which added visual interest to the character's silhouette in the final shot.
Character Look Development - Cheek Tufts (Long Fur)
The process for the cheek tufts began with initial tests using XGen's Tube Grooming Workflow. Originially the groom was going to be created entirely in XGen, but the course instructors and industry mentors recommended switching to Houdini. While we switched to Houdini, I still utilized the tubes to help generate guides in Houdini which would control the shape of the cheek tufts. Sadly, his mohawk was removed (RIP to the Mohawk), but I still enjoyed adding modifiers to the cheek tufts to create interesting shapes for them.
Character Look Development - Final Renders
Final Renders
The last step was rendering the fur in RenderMan (our rendering engine for the short). I exported the groom as an alembic cache from Houdini to Maya. Next, I added a LamaHairChiang node which has built in primary, transmit, secondary, and azimuthal roughness paramaters which I modified to get the shading of the fur. Ensuring the white color looked clean and bright was important with the shader and adjusting rendering settings helped with this as well.
Prop Modeling
Along with working on the character, I modeled a few background props in Maya. For the glass bottles, I created a variety in height and width of bottles to add to the shelves in the background of the treehouse.
Prop Look Development
The crayons were fun background assets that I textured.
I also textured the polaroid camera in Substance Painter & RenderMan.