Here’s a collection of some of the 3D work I’ve done (click on any image to view it at full size).
Timeless Veins Shot
In my final year as a student I did some work for a student film called Timeless. The project is an homage to science fiction and incorporates a drug characters take which is visualized in the film with this shot:
The shot was a ton of fun to work on and design with the supervisor on the film and I created the entire thing procedurally in Houdini and Redshift. I ran into a lot of new engaging challenges. The veins’ motion is driven by particles that randomly branch apart based on chance, moving through the “tunnel” while avoiding hitting the walls. It took a lot of fine tuning to get them looking good and I’m happy with the result. Another subtle detail is that the thickness of the veins naturally appears to flow or pulse along the length of the vein, suggesting blood or something pumping through them. The project taught me a lot about particles in Houdini as well as shading organic, growing geometry like the veins.
For a detailed breakdown of this shot see my Senior Studio 2 Project progress blog!
Procedural Shading
Cactus
A cactus model I was tasked with shading completely procedurally. I used no textures and only Redshift nodes in Houdini to build the look of the cactus and rendered from Houdini as well. I’m most proud of the material on the pot itself, which was created with several layers of Redshift’s MaxonNoise combined and fed into color, displacement, and roughness maps
Bubbles
For my procedural shading class in college, we were tasked with a project involving writing a custom OSL shader. For mine I chose to make bubbles! It was fun to figure out as Redshift didn’t have thin film options at the time. I had to do a lot of research on correctly emulating the effect. I wrote an OSL script that incorporated a thin film algorithm from the VRAY documentation with customizable IOR and strength values. I also incorporate an adjustable noise to add some interest to the iridescence as most of the time these films are filled with tiny swirls and patterns.
Newton’s Cradle
A Newton’s cradle I modeled and shaded completely using Python and OSL. The number of balls is customizable, and by adding custom properties I designed the script so that each ball’s material color can be customized by simply clicking on it in the viewport (see it in action in the second video).
Texturing
Fruits before and after
This was a project I did with the goal of creating realistic textures from scratch for several kinds of fruit in a brand new state as well as a state with decay and mold. I used free-to-use models from Turbosquid, used Substance Designer to paint the textures and used Maya and Arnold for layout/rendering. It was my first time texturing organic materials from scratch and I enjoyed gathering research and reference for the types of decay that happen to fruit over time.
