CG Environment Demo Reel- Courtney Fielding

Hi everyone! Here's my 2023 Rookie's Entry presenting my best modeling pieces. These past 6 months, I've taken a deeper dive into two different types of modeling, and wanted to showcase both of those here. I first learned and experimented with Houdini and some of its procedural modeling capabilities, and created a procedural gingerbread house model that can be manipulated with my own custom GUI system. As shown below in my breakdown, such tools allow for quick variation on the fly! Additionally, I also challenged myself with a more stylized modeling approach, and took a piece from concept to finish. For this project, I modeled the basis in Maya, procedurally modeled the grass and thatched roof in Houdini, and rendered the project in Renderman. Through this process, I've come to appreciate both types of modeling, and have been discovering and learning when to use both techniques! 

'Boat House'

Based on concept art from 三叠色 Size (labeled as 'student work'), I present my first environment from concept project! For this project, I modeled the majority of the house and deck structures in Maya. Additionally, I modeled my thatched roof and grass using Houdini. I then textured my Maya assets in Substance Painter and used Houdini Solaris to organize my project via USD's. I then had one file where I connected my shaders and laid out my scene's geometry, and another scene that imported the USD layout into my final Houdini scene, combined with other procedurally-created aspects of my scene. Finally, I rendered my project out in Renderman, using noises to texture my procedurally-generated geometry.

Maya shaded and wireframe renders

Link to the concept art here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VyLLXn

Procedural Gingerbread House Model

This is my first Houdini project which was, overall, a lot of fun to make! I decided to re-create a simpler version of Russia's beautiful St. Basil's cathedral, but out of gingerbread! I enjoyed not only listening to the song ‘Rasputin’ by Boney M. on loop for the entire project, but also enjoyed the process of learning how basic proceduralism works. 

In my project, I created 3 different gingerbread towers, all with adjustable variables easily accessible through my created User Input sections. Most notably, I designed each tower so that the amount of tower segments/sides can be adjusted with a slider bar. Additionally, I assigned my onion dome shapes to a ramp, allowing for the dome shapes to be changed according to the user. I also allowed for the amount of stripes on each dome to be adjustable as well, with an option to enable the stripes to twist. Along with this, I created a user input allowing for variability in the amount of twist of the stripes around the dome, along with an option to reverse the twist. Finally, I have simple color parameters that are able to be adjusted at the bottom of the UI. 

Ultimately, I was able to accomplish these procedural aspects through utilizing Houdini's copy to points nodes, and using attribute wrangle nodes to allow me to select the primitive numbers of my choosing. The final product results in 6 towers that can be adjusted, creating 3 still images that all vary for each other. Through my project, I hoped to accomplish ease of access for variability in design changes, and hope I demonstrated that in my final product!

Here's my still-images displaying the project's variation abilities:

And here's the breakdown video of my process as well. Hope you enjoyed!