Underwater City\ Grandma

Hi, I'm Toula and I am a 3D hobbyist.

I have two animated shots that I would like to share. The first shot is from a project called Underwater City. The premise of Underwater City is a community displaced by Global Warming and has nowhere else to live but in pods under the sea. Their forays to the surface are assisted by elevators, decompression chambers (the “igloo” is essentially a decompression chamber) and they come to the surface for fresh air and sunlight and occasionally when the weather is fine, picnics.

This is a still at frame 1:

This is the animated shot:

I created the environment in Vue. The sea, sky, clouds and iceberg are all textured and rendered with the Vue render engine. The iceberg was created from terrain with a blend of materials to give it that snowy, iceberg look.

The “igloo” lookout post has been modelled in Maya and rendered in VRay. I have used NCloth for the netting around the Igloo to give the appearance of weight and flexibility. The materials are a combination of Substance and VRay materials and some work has been done in Photoshop also.

The glass elevator I modelled using this reference from a glass elevator manufacturer: 

Here are some working shots of the Igloo close-up: 

The Igloo character is a minor character with a default HIK rig. The animation is Mocap-applied with a Mixamo file from www.mixamo.com. Thank you, Adobe.

The characters clothing was created in ZBrush. The poncho has been animated in Marvelous Designer, textured in Substance and has been rendered with VRay fur applied. 

The wind turbines are from a high-resolution photograph downloaded from flickr.com.

The photograph was uploaded by the wind turbine manufacturer Iberdrola, thank you Iberdrola. 

I keyed out the background of the photograph in Nuke (Primatte) and created an alpha and cut out the turbine blades in Photoshop. I then brought these elements into Nuke and animated the blades. 

Because I used two separate render engines, I used a roto node to cut out the reflections and shadows from the Igloo on the animated sea (Vue) and merge them together with the igloo from (VRay). 

My other animated shot was inspired by an HDRI photo of a café I saw on Polyhaven.com. Many thanks to the author below for the gorgeous photo. 

I saw this photo during the Covid lock-downs when no-one where I live could go out to eat at a café and I thought how nice it would be to go out for a coffee. I decided to model a café in Maya with a similar look and feel to the photo.

My featured character is a grandma who sunk her life savings into a café which had only been open for two months before Covid hit. So now, with the umpteenth closing of the café due to lockdowns, bills piling up, and having to let go of her staff it's become too much for her; she sits and drinks alone.

Granny has been modelled in Reallusion and ZBrush.

The animation was applied with Mocap within Motion Builder with a file from Mixamo.com.

Grandma’s dress was modelled in Marvellous Designer and animated using Maya nCloth. I used wrap deformers for the scalp and dress.

Grandma’s bangle is constrained to her wrist bone using a point and orient constraint within Maya and rendered out as a geometry cache.

Grandma's slippers were constrained to Grandmas feet bones in Reallusion. I found it necessary to paint weights later in Maya to get them looking how I wanted them to look during the animation.

All the 3D objects in the scene are my own creation except for Grandmas slippers, which were a free download from Turbosquid from a contributer with the moniker of Digital Motives, thank you Digital Motives. I retopoed the slippers into quads and textured them in Substance.

The bird pictures in the frames are from promotional material from Tuckfields now Tetleys Tea, which issued them as collectible trading cards in packets of tea.

https://www.pittwateronlinenews.com/Tuckfields-Bird-Cards-Swap-Cards-Collectors.php

Almost all texturing work was done in Substance: a small amount was done in Photoshop. No photographic textures were applied.

The shot has been rendered in VRay and features VRay displacement for Grandma’s dress, the brick walls, and Grandmas slippers. The shot is composited in Nuke.

I rendered out objects separately so I could Grade them if needed and to modify the lighting and shadows.

I rotoed out some artifacts including geometry that extruded out from the edges of the room (my bad!)

There was some inner penetration of Grandmas dress which I fixed up with a RotoPaint node. 

Finally, I would like to share some of my ZBrush sculpting work.

The design of the mirror I got from a texture pack of picture frames which I purchased to use as a reference. 

The mirror took about a month to sculpt and texture, working two to three hours most days. Rather than using an image map for a reference I converted the photo to black and white and created a very rough height map in Photoshop which I then brought into either Vue or World Machine (it was a while ago so I don’t quite remember which) and generated a flat piece of geo with the mirror design displacement on it as a base for the sculpt. 

The texture was projected onto the model in ZBrush from the texture photo. 

I hope you like my work. My aim is to one day work alongside a team of artists as a Compositor. Thank you for your time and consideration.