WEEK 4

We were given great feedback from the mentors this week, which changed the trajectory of our pipeline. Because we had issues bringing my shaders from Maya to Houdini, Wei and I are reversing our workflow. I'll now be bringing her animation and models into Maya and rendering shots 1-3 in Arnold. This way, it'll be easier for me to add additional lighting to the scenes as I'm more comfortable in Maya.

Mentor feedback specific to me entailed work on my flower and branch shaders, which is my first priority this week.

Starting with the flower, my shaders were lacking subsurface scattering and translucency in the petals. I gathered more reference images to study the subtle veining in flower petals.

Petal veining reference

Professor Gaynor then sat down with me to explain different approaches to the issues I had. After making numerous adjustments to the bump, subsurface, and opacity maps, I came to a result I'm much happier with.

Flower shader progression

It is also officially decided that I will be taking care of the ripple animations of our lake. I haven't done much animation like this before, so I started with a simple test to figure out the most efficient approach. For now, I plan to use an animated noise bump map, which I will likely texture with Jenson's water shader.

Shot 1 needed attention, and I was trusted to experiment with different ways to lay the scene. I came up with a new shot 1 and compared it to our original.