The Little Red Panda

Here is my Red Panda project with the purpose of improving my groom skills using Houdini. The groom has been created using the Groom Bear plugin and each guide has been individually placed and shaped. The texture maps were created using Substance Painter and randomized inside Houdini using a probability based system to create variation in  the groom. The Model has been posed and sculpted in ZBrush from an original base mesh which blocked out the hair volumes. I have used blend shapes to apply the changes i have made to the model to the original topology. The scene is made up of a HDRI and a simple CG tree mesh which has been lit and rendered inside Houdini using Arnold. I hope you enjoy the final renders and breakdown videos I have created.

The groom is made up of 3 levels of clump systems as shown in the breakdown above. I have varied the clump size and density using maps painted onto the base mesh inside Houdini. The entire groom is split into 3 different hairGen systems -one for the head to tackle the most dense areas and most important area to have specific guide direction, one for the body, and one for the tail to allow a fourth clumping system to be applied. There are also specific guides for the whiskers.

By animating the cameras in Houdini, I created a simple camera move using depth of field to focus the eye on the panda. I have aimed to frame the trees around the character.

Posed Turntable

T-Pose Turntable

This turntable shows the groom in the original T-pose before it was posed in ZBrush using the transpose tools. I used a guide deformer to transfer the guides from the T-pose mesh to the Posed version inside Houdini.

Grey Shader Groom

Groom Guides

Thank you for taking the time to look at my project. Please check out my website portfolio for more.

https://ameliasturdy3dportfolio.link/