The Seasons of Buddha

I like how this project mixed together pretty much all the parts of a production pipeline. There's a little bit of everything here: directing, modeling, animation, rendering, VFX simulations, compositing AND I worked with the great SFX artist Nicholas Frickleton to create the sound and music for this.

Really enjoyed the procedural modeling of the assets here: art-directable bamboo trees, procedural rain and snow, even the temples to the side. The look and feel for each season got a big upgrade through compositing the render AOVs in Nuke. I can't overstate how much post-processing can push the final look of your render. It's also extremely flexible, giving you the freedom to affect a lot of the scenes just by tweaking a few of the layers in your comp.

I've learned so much from this project and I'm that much more confident about tackling larger endeavors thanks to it.

Here I tried to show a little bit of the workings of the effects and simulations as well as how they are made to be art-directable and flexible.

I had made GIFs ripe with WIP images I took throughout the production but it seems I can't upload that format here (sigh). These process sequences look pretty cool though!

I was in a cafè waiting for a terrible rain downpour to end when I had this idea. The scan above is the sketch of the storyboard I made there, blocking out the first few shots.