Graduate Groom Showreel & Projects

Hello!

I am a graduate VFX student from the University of Hertfordshire, I've just completed my final year and wanted to share some of my best work from the past two years. I chose to specialise in Groom Artistry in the second semester of my second year, so it's been roughly a year and a half of building my knowledge and skills in Houdini.

I've included my show-reel and some break down processes, I hope you enjoy!

If you like, you can connect with me on LinkedIn :)

Bison Project

The bison was my main show reel piece this year. I had intended to complete the full creature but the demands of my other University work and having to produce three full grooms on top of other assignments meant I made the choice to do a bust so I wouldn't compromise the quality of my work.

This piece was a joint effort with Ewan Palmer, as he wanted to do an organic piece for his texturing and look dev reel. We teamed up to create "Billy" and we're really happy with how he came out!

Below you can see my nodal set ups in Houdini - this approach was influenced by Gabriela Salmeron's SideFX series on Barry Bacon, and was my first foray into sub clumping. 

I've included some close ups below of the processes - the guide visualisation was a little trick I picked up from Kristin Farrensteiner's Gnomon course, as it allowed me to visualise hair generation based on an 'active area' defined by the guide placements. I toggled between this as I was building my guides, as it helped me visualise how the hair would generate and meant that when it eventually came to breaking down my hair systems, it was a very quick process. 

The main take away from this project was that although direct, hand placed guides are very artistic and yield very precise results, they are extremely time consuming. Overall, this project maybe took me a week and a half of full time work day hours to complete, and the majority of the time was spent on the guides. I know I will get quicker with practice, but as usual a blend of direct and procedural approaches were used and what gets you there, gets you there!

Base Mesh, Guides and Hair generation.

Maps for main density, clump density, no hair and fur direction.

My other main project this past year was my final year film Headlights, which I've included a process evidence reel for below that also included some personal project updates after receiving feedback. If you would like to see more about Headlights, you can view the Rookies entry by my team here.

Thank you for reading :)