Peach Harvesting Robot

A breakdown of the three shots of the robot from the commercial along with a few sketches I made afterwards to help with visualizing the project.

I knew I wanted to procedurally build out the arms, so before starting on the main body of the robot, I did a test to see if I could do so using the modifiers in Blender. 

First I started by using the default simple tree node in Houdini before creating a custom network. To get the hand painted look, I adapted a Blender tutorial from Lightning Boy Studio for Houdini. The biggest takeaway from the tutorial was to creating custom normals by having the leaves point towards a proxy mesh in a similar shape.

From left to right: the initial tree, the proxy mesh for adjusting normals, the leaves without custom normals, and the leaves with custom normals.

Variations of moss I tried before ultimately deciding against it because it was too distracting. From left to right: high poly mesh made in Houdini, simplified version of the Houdini mesh, and as a hand painted texture.

The initial blockout of the main body compared to the final product.