Guidance

Guidance is a collaboration piece between animator Joshua Lewis and me. The project is Joshua’s original concept, inspired by his childhood experience of spreading his uncle's ashes with his mom. It's a very meaningful and emotional piece for both of us.

We try to capture the confusion he felt when he was a child, not understanding the situation, tries to understand how something so beautiful can be so sad, without needing words to say it.

Responsible for FX, Environments building, Lighting and Compositing.

Software: Houdini, Maya, Nuke, SpeedTree, DaVinci Resolve, Karma

Breakdowns

Zoning The Shorelines

To create the long beach line in this project, I segment the water simulation based on its distance to the cameras. In this way, I can set up flip simulations in different resolutions to maximise efficiency.

The Smooth Edge of the Water

Since I chose to make close-up shots of the beach, I know the edge of the water would be challenging.

Even at the smallest particle separation setting, the edge of the ocean sim is still not dense enough to get a smooth, non-popping mesh. to overcome this issue, I used the original water sim and cast a mask on the sand geo, then emitted points from this mask and merged it back to the water mesh.

Blending Edge Of The Water

The water mesh now has a smooth edge, but it still needs extra steps to blend seamlessly with the sand.

To achieve this, I first ray the water to the sand, then smooth the affected sand area and ray it back to the water mesh. Finally, I use a wetmap and edge mask for finer control over the texture, colour, and alpha to complete the blend.

Environment Building

This was a group project based on Joshua Lewis’ concept. He took care of the compositing in Maya and passed me the blockout of the scene, which I used as a guide to shape the mountains and beach with height fields in Houdini.

From here, I scattered different shoreline plants I created in SpeedTree across the landscape. In terms of sands, I used MPM to give the sand realistic movement wherever it interacts with the character.”