Monica Chavez Trochez - Entry

Hello there! I am Monica Chavez Trochez, a soon-to-be Master of Arts in Visual Effects from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) . I'm a CG artist and I specialize in 3D Modeling, Look Development and Procedural Generation. 

Here is a glimpse of some of the work I've done throughout my journey at SCAD.

La Manigua

This is my final project for my MA in Visual Effects. The goal of the project was to explore a variety of animal skins put into a single creature. Therefore I came up with the concept of La Manigua, a hybrid creature that combines features of different animals found in the Amazon rainforest (Jaguars, Tapirs, Frogs,  Hummingbirds, Guacamayas, Black Caimans and Green Iguanas). I was responsible for every aspect of this project.

Concept

Creating an original creature that could mix all these animals into one was a challenging task. La Manigua has the body, ears and spotted fur of a Jaguar; the head shape resembles a Tapir and the skin is like the one of a Green Iguana; the chest is covered with small feathers like the ones Hummingbirds have on their heads and neck, the forelegs also have some feathers inspired on Guacamayas; the tail has the same shape as of Black Caimans' but with a Frog-like skin. Finally, to give it a more fantasy-like look, I added some hints of teal on the overall color, and I added horns to the design since it seemed like a fun challenge.

The name La Manigua comes from a term from indigenous communities in Colombia which means the whispering spell that pulls you back to the Colombian rainforest, it is the feeling of desire to be surrounded by the natural beauty of the jungle that always makes you want to come back. I see La Manigua as a mythical creature that acts as a guardian of the rainforest.

Modeling

The modeling process was a combination of sculpting with ZBrush, doing the retopology with Maya and creating procedural geometry with Houdini.

The scales of the head were made procedurally following a Voronoi pattern, the scattering of the points was painted with weights so that there were bigger and smaller scales depending on the region of the head. When the scales were done, they were combined with the high-poly base mesh and later baked onto the low-poly model.

The feathers on the chest and belly resembled Hummingbird feathers. They were procedurally made by creating a single "feather strand" that would be later duplicated following a curve. The length of each copy could be changed by modifying the values on a ramp. Lastly, I generated a hair system to guide how the feathers would be placed along the mesh.

For the feathers on the forelegs, I used a system that takes a curve as the base and scatters points along it where the feathers will come out. The normals of the scattered points can be modified by changing the values on a ramp so that the direction of the feathers varies along the curve. The amount of copies of feathers can also be defined, as well as the length and width of each feather using a similar system like the orientation.

I created a few variations for the feathers that would be randomly placed on the feather system.

Texturing

The first step for texturing was to bake the high-res model onto the low-poly mesh using Substance Painter. Then, with the exported maps, I used them as a base to start texturing the majority of the creature with Mari. The longer feathers were also baked, but from the procedurally-generated geometry onto image maps using the Houdini Labs Maps Baker, and then the maps were used in Photoshop to create some iterations of color. The color of the feathers on the chest was randomly generated within some ranges of a color ramp for each feather using a Color Attribute, and then it was exported as data that could be read as the Base Color of the Arnold shader. 

Look Development

I used Arnold in Houdini for shading and rendering the character.  The challenging part was adjusting the shader attributes accordingly for each body part since there were different types of animal skins, this meant that attributes like the roughness, the subsurface scattering or the IOR needed to be adjusted with masks or maps to represent the big differences of each type of skin.

Lighting and Rendering

To create the environment I used assets and textures from Quixel Megascans. The shot was lit with one key spot light using a gobo and an HDRI from PolyHaven. Lastly, I added an atmospheric fog to generate some God rays.

For the gobo filter, I generated it from the same HDRI using a Cubemap projection and choosing the brightest spot where the sun is. Then I duplicated it twice, rotating it and blurring it so that the trees and branches became more dense.

Compositing

With the help of AOVs, I composited the final image so it would have a stronger outcome, adjusting the specular reflections, doing some color correction, adding some glow to the brightest spots, compositing the atmosphere on top, adding a depth of field, among other things, until I ended up with the final look.

Carnaval de Barranquilla

The purpose of this project was to create a non-traditional cuckoo clock with a specific theme. This particular clock was inspired on the "Carnaval de Barranquilla" which is one of the most important festivals in Colombia. I was responsible for every aspect.

Concept

Close ups

Whale Automaton

For this project I created a procedural animation of a wooden Humpback Whale Automaton using Houdini. This was inspired on the art of Sylvain Gautier (syl.gauiter on Instagram), recreating the motion of one of his automatons. I was responsible for every aspect, except for the concept.

Mechanism

The first step was to create the wire rig that controls the movement of the whale. In order to do that I placed some points trying to create a shape relatively similar to the reference and joining them creating a polygon. Then, I created an expression for the rotation of the wire, according to the frames. 

I also connected the wires attaching the whale to the mechanism. Each wire had 3 points. The first point copied the exact position of the respective middle point previously created on the base wire on every axis. The second point only copied the position on the x axis with a "controlled random" offset and it had a constant value on the y axis (this is where the base would be located). For the last point, the x value is similar to the second point by copying the position and adding an offset, the y value is copying the y position of the first point and also adding an offset, and lastly for the z value it is also copying the z position of the first value but it is decreasing the amount of movement by multiplying it to a small factor (this is to create an illusion of a horizontal movement of the whale).

Then I joined the last three points of each wire where the whale is going to be located, by creating a new polygon with an add node, referencing the position of each point. 

I created a curve so it had a more organic shape, keeping in mind that there needed to be five parts of the whale that I would need to attach to certain points of that curve. Then I added normals to each point but they were facing a direction that was not beneficial for the desired movement of the whale, so I made sure they were facing the same direction as the curve.

For the last part of the mechanics, I added some test geometry similar to the shape of a whale to test how the movement was working and to change the "controlled random" position of the points if needed, as well as the speed of the movement.

Assets

I used Blender to sculpt the whale and the waves. For the whale, I divided the mesh into five parts and I created their UVs inside Blender as well, then I exported the objects to Substance Painter to create the textures there.

Then I imported the mesh into Houdini and for the whale, I replace the base model I had for reference with the high poly sculpt. I also modified the position of the points according to the length of the whale and I added the cylinders attaching one part to the other.

Thank you for reading my entry!

Software: Maya, Houdini, Substance Painter, Mari, Nuke, Arnold, ZBrush, Mantra, Photoshop, Procreate, After Effects, Python, Blender.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-chavez-trochez/

Website: https://www.monicactrochez.com/