Outgrowth

I was tasked with using organic modeling techniques to produce an animation at least 10 seconds in length.

The idea for this animation is there is a desolate environment void of life. A Koi fish the swims through the environment and brings life to the area.

This was produced using a combination of Houdini, Cinema 4D and Octane Render.

Process

This is the animatic that was delivered and approved. Very minor changes were made but all in all everything stayed the same.

Plant Animation

These were a lot of fun to work on. I made 7 plant variations that I instanced on a plane for testing. The plants were cached out and instanced as proxy geo, then I used a color attribute to control the time offset. The brighter the color, the earlier the cached plant animation would trigger.

Plant Texture

There were a couple different ways I was thinking about texturing these plants. I knew I wanted them to have a holographic look but there's many different ways to get there.

My first idea was to take the color attribute in Houdini and ray points onto the animated plants. This is a very interesting look but resulted in very long render times and was expensive in terms of storage.

My second idea was the one I decided to go with because it's much faster. I exported the plants as usual into Cinema 4D and with Octane I box projected a halftone texture and horizontal lines texture directly onto the geo.

Technique_v01

Technique_v02

Fish Animation

I didn't want to just slap the same texture because after doing some tests it didn't exactly feel developed as much as I would like.

I ended up taking the fish model I sculpted and raying points on the model and animating those points with noise.