Cici Zheng
VFX ARTIST
A Piece of Cake
I have a very bubbly and happy personality. I always want my artworks to cheer people up and make them happy. So when I first took Christian’s destruction class in Gnomon, I knew I didn’t want to create a scene of disaster; no blown-up houses or wrecked cars. Instead, I want this piece to make my audience feel warm and relaxed. That's when the idea of cutting a cake comes to mind during my birthday party, it's still a destruction project, but one that makes you smile.
Responsible for FX, Animation, Set and props modelling and tecturing, Lighting & Compositing.
Software: Houdini, Nuke, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Karma, Corpernicus.
Breakdowns
The Cut
Recreating the softness and sponginess of cake with tools designed for breaking walls pushed me into new territory. I did my best to manipulate the constraint so the RBD sim looked as soft as possible, then I used the velocity from the simulation to guide the behavior of the MPM solver for a more springy, realistic cut.
Panterly Effect
For the painterly look, I found a couple of free paintbrush sets for Photoshop and imported them to Houdini, then I scattered those brush strokes over the camera-facing surfaces. Finally, I made different custom criptomattes that allow me to control how far I want to push the painterly look in post in Nuke.
Copernicus
On top of the scattered paint brushes, I also decided to try out Houdini’s newly released Copernicus workflow. COP allowed me to create custom 2D paintbrush textures for all my assets directly inside the software, making the whole stylised look more cohesive and complete.
