Hi, I posted a tease last year and I really hope this lives up to it.

Juniper:

Juniper was a great collaboration and an incredibly fun challenge to figure out. I got to get a good grasp on Vellum with clothes, jewelry, hair and flowers all being a Vellum sim. Also got to play around with KineFX doing a quick rig of her and animating inside Houdini. Hair was one of the biggest challenges we encountered on this journey. Originally Alena did a beautiful 11/10 groom inside Maya with Yeti, but after many attempts and several screams at Maya we brought Alena’s groom guides into Houdini and I generated hairs from them inside Houdini. We ended up having to render hair in Redshift in Houdini and everything else in Maya with Vray, it gave us a fun challenge of matching it in Nuke, but I believe it turned out well =)

River witch:

Riverwitch was a challenge to myself trying to make vast majority of the project myself. Besides a couple of textures and help with audio, I got to make all of the aspects of it myself, even got to dance around for it in a mocap suit.

River witch started in Liquid Simulations class where I had an idea to shove a crazy witch into the middle of a river assignment(I HAD THIS IDEA BEFORE JILBARO, although Albeto Mielgo is a giant inspiration of mine). 

I approached the water sim for this in 3 parts that later mesh together. I used a low resolution sim of the whole river to start it off and then used the middle part to help emit into the sides. It was done that way to save time, effort, some hairs, and I just couldn’t sim high res enough river with my resources. It was a surprisingly smooth experience. What wasn’t a smooth experience was doing a 2 way sim between clothes and water. Although it was a great challenge and it felt awesome to figure it out, it made sim really slow and I ended up doing 2 way solve at a lower res and then using clothes as a collider. In future I am going to avoid 2 way solves like this, unless I have a render farm, however much fun they are, the speed did not feel worth it, at least in this case. White water was also 3 different WW sims that combined together, cleaned up and rendered both as particles and as a volume.

I started Gnomon wanting to be a character artist and environments were always a challenge for me. I ended up making several tools to help shape the rocks and then make moss for them. For moss I am rendering a ton of hairs(with different LODs depending how far away rocks are) and then making a shape to act as a matte object for renders that don’t need to have the moss in them. 

Character was a blast to make for this one. I had fun making the dress in Marvelous Designer and bringing it back to Houdini for Vellum( my preferred clothes workflow). Hair was done in the same Jackson Lukas’s class as Juniper's hair. It was my second ever groom and I got to experiment with it and make it crazy. Adding bleeding eyes was also quite an experiment, at first I tried to simulate it, but it was hard to get it to look right and with it having to be so high res it quickly stopped being fun, so I ended up making it as a growing vfb with various reshapes and noises, it allows for better control and if desired could be used as a base for a another sim on top of it.

Break:

RBDs were always my bain and I wanted to learn more about post sim control, so I decided to break a thing and repair it, and it just so happened that I have a sculpt laying around.

It was a fun project, I was happy to get more comfortable with RBDs and now feel ready to tackle a bigger RBD challenge. Learning more about ways to control geometry and getting mudded up with some matrixes and quartonians was a lot less scary than I thought and it’s incredibly useful tools that I am continuing to use. Got to really push my comping skills. However much I love Karma XPU and even recently getting to use it professionally, it still has ways to go, so renders had to be separated in many parts and then reassembled, I ended up rendering some glow passes out of Redshift due to how much easier was it to get the right look.

Blossom:

Blossom is a project I am going to keep working on for a while. The goal is to make a music video to the song Blossom by Audrey Nuna. Hopefully next year( I think I am legible) you will see it submitted into shorts category.

I tried to approach Blossom with making the whole short in mind. The whole setup is a bunch of tools with main control points. Learned many ways of blending different variations of CFX simulations doing them at rest, moving along the shot and with feeding velocities from moving geometry(KineFX strikes back again). 

As I said earlier, Blossom will return once again.In my eyes it still has a long way to go and I cannot wait to make it look like what’s inside my head.

 Beautiful texturng on the face and board are done by Jonny Boston(real name).

Thank you for taking a read or a scroll, hope you like my work and if you want to check out my reel and a bit of other work(with some professional and personal work incoming), you can find me at draganiuk.art

And you are a fellow Gnomie, it’s been an absolute pleasure to go to the same school with you. I will miss Gnomon, it’s education, faculty, opportunities and most importantly people very dearly, but good things end, and the next chapter is beyond exciting.

And pls, don’t forget, you are a f******* artist.