Lisa-Maria Zeuge - Animation and Grooming

Dragon Animation - Learn how to fly

Description

Hey there! See my first work-in-progress Demo-Reel project, where I focus on creature animation, specifically dragons, which have always held a special place in my heart. Taking advantage of the expertise of our animation teacher Philipp Willer, known for his skill in dragon animation, I learned valuable techniques to create my very own dragon shot.

Collaborating with the talented artist Emilio Lingg, we combined our skills to bring the project to life. Emilio's contribution in background, Lighting/LookDev, and Compositing was exceptional, he even simulated the clouds in the foreground. My primary role in this project was the animation of the dragon.

My Workflow

To get a cool dragon in our shot, I used the Tyrant Rig from Truong, which provided a solid foundation for my animation. To kickoff the process, I focused on creating a flycycle animation.

Understanding the technical aspects of a flycycle was crucial, so I searched real-life references such as giant flying foxes to understand how the wings and body interact. Additionally, Brendan Body's "Tips and Observations of Bird Flight" proved invaluable in enhancing my understanding of wing movement.

I started by animating the wings, ensuring they moved in a figure-eight pattern. Then I added rotations of the wrist and fingers to achieve a more realistic motion. Next, I included chest movement, matching it with the wings, where the chest would rise as the wings go down and vice versa.

Once I established the chest movement, I progressed through the entire body, beginning with the hips. At first it was pretty difficult for me to get the offset and pendulum-like movement through the body, so to maintain focus on the body without distractions from the wings, I added spheres to the body controllers. These spheres allowed me to get a clearer sight on the movement of the body parts and simplified my work drastically.

Once I setup the flycycle of the dragon, I started to shape the crucial poses, for the shot, like the gliding and diving pose.

In the next stages of my workflow, I assembled all the elements together within the shot scene. To gain a reference for how my dragon is about to fly, I drew inspiration from the entry scene of Rhaenyra and Syrax from House of the Dragon Season 1, Episode 1.

I created a motion path, allowing me to align the dragon's movement with the predetermined trajectory. I matched the dragon to the path and blocked out the shot, considering both the speed of the dragon and camera. By blending the flycycle animation and various poses together and animating adjustments I made the dragon fly.

One significant challenge I encountered was animating the dive of the dragon. It proved to be a complex task, particularly in determining when the dragon would bring its wings in and when it would begin to fall. To tackle this, me and my friend Cindy Vollrodt even experimented with physics calculations to estimate the dragon's speed and the distance it would cover before going down. Alongside references of diving birds, dragons from Game of Thrones, and valuable feedback from both Philipp Willer and Jacob Doehner, I pushed through and reached this point of my animation. And I cannot wait, to work further on this project and improve myself even more! So stay tuned!

Bruno - the Brave Bison

Description

"Bruno the Brave Bison" is an exciting collaborative project that I am currently working on for my demo reel. In this project, I have teamed up with Sophie von Bomhard, who is responsible for the environment, lighting and compositing, and Tilman Eubel, who will be rigging the bison. I am in charge of the grooming, LookDev and rendering of the fur in Houdini, and also for animation later on. 

With this entry I aim to showcase my skills  in grooming and highlighting the intricate details and realistic rendering of the bison's fur. The groom has already been completed and I am thrilled with the results, which is why I want to submit it to The Rookies!

Getting Started - Model, References and Planning

I wanted to push myself and set myself a challenge and chose an animal with unique fur and captivating patterns. That's when I stumbled upon Nicolas Morel's incredible bison model—and immediately fell in love. It was the perfect fit for our project, because after all, a great groom starts with a solid foundation.

As I wanted to get my groom as close as possible to real-life, I collected a lot of references of male American bisons and carefully studied their fur structure, lift and directions. Understanding these key elements was crucial to achieving a realistic and natural look.

My Workflow - Creating Guides

I groomed the Bison in Houdini completely. First I created guides for the bison's fur. Since I anticipated a heavy fur system and was concerned about a low performance of Houdini, I decided to separate the fur into several guide systems. This approach helped optimize the workflow and maintain efficiency throughout the process.

At this stage, I focused on establishing the basic shape and flow of the fur, ensuring it aligned with the natural patterns observed in real American bisons. I should note that I have not yet added any curling or other intricate details to the fur. This step will come in the hair generation. 

My Workflow - Hair Generation and Making Wool

 I began the hair generation with a high hair density and added clumps. However, I chose not to use the curliness option available, instead  I used an attribute wrangle expression our Grooming Teacher Luca Buonopane, told me about. Thanks for that! With this expression you can edit the clumps with guide processes at its whole, instead of single hairs. This is pretty useful when you want to add random curliness and length to clumps.

Early on, I realized that the density-focused approach was not optimal due to limited RAM and frequent crashes in Houdini. Fortunately, I attended at FMX Fare in Germany and heard a talk by Gabriela Salmeron about making of 3D animals. She discussed creating wool using clump layers, which sparked an idea for my bison groom.

To address the performance issues, I reduced the groom's density and employed a clump node along with the attribute wrangle strategy I mentioned earlier. I repeated this process multiple times, tweaking the values to create variation in each layer, and then merged them together. This approach yielded even better results than before.

To ensure the desired outcome and improve Houdini's performance, I tested various fur looks on spheres in separate scenes. Once satisfied, I applied the optimized settings to the bison systems, which definitely helped me improve my groom.

To add colors to my groom, I took an attribute paint node and painted the colors onto the model and then an attribute transfer to copy the Cd attribute onto the fur. This worked quite well, except for the Headgen, because its so voluminous and the colors were not at the right place. At this point I created a Volumemesh of the head, painted onto that one and also used an attribute transfer.

At last I wanted to add dirt and grass onto the Groom to create an even more realistic look. I searched for a method to do this and stumbled over a tutorial by where it was shown how to scatter leaves on points, with a copy to points node. I thought this could be transferred to my groom and tested it out, with minor adjustments. The in the video used scatter and align node alone did not work with fur, but with the normal scatter node it did. The only problem I had, is that the geometries were not randomizable in scale and rotation. I figured out that I could randomize the scale via pscale with an attribute randomize, but not the orientation. That's why I copied several object merges with different orientations. So If anyone has a solution for this - I would be grateful! Otherwise I have to figure it out by myself, in the upcoming weeks!

Sophie wants to focus to work in Unreal Engine, yet I wanted to keep my Groom rendered in Houdini, for the best quality. So we setup a workflow to render fur in houdini and the evironment in Unreal Engine and put it together in Nuke. My part in this process was, to get into Solaris and figure out how to import camera, lights and the ground to Houdini and render it in Karma. The keypoint in this process is, that Unreal and Houdini work with different World Spaces, so its crucial to match them both right at the beginning, to avoid transformation issues. (That's what we underestimated... so our camera does not match 100%). We used the USD workflow and Houdini was able to read the camera and even the lights, with just minor issues.

The rendering of the fur was a great challenge for me, because when I transferred the Groom into Solaris, Houdini kept crashing. So I decided to render the fur in several parts and put them together in Nuke afterwards. With Cryptomatte this worked pretty well, with the help of Emilio Lingg, Thanks!

Overall I am really happy to show you my Bison work in progress, because I just started diving into the big world of Houdini. And eventhough we hads minor issues with the combination of Unreal Engine and Houdini I am pretty proud of us, as we just started the combination process just a few days ago!

I am excited, how our project will turn out in the end, and I am even more excited about your thoughts on my work! Thank you for reading! 

Cheers!