3D ANIMATIONS
AQUA FLORA
Bubbles magically turning into a plant in the ocean...
Aqua Flora started as simple fun experiment, revealing itself layer by layer as I went along with it, Not really knowing what the exact final outcome would be.
Credits:
Ramtin Ahmadi - Art Direction, Execution and Sound
Special thanks to Ali Seiffouri for the title suggestion.
Ramtin Ahmadi
2020
Technical Overview
It all started with a base mesh for the stem of the flower sculpted in zbrush, To later be imported in Houdini.
After fracturing the mesh into pieces, A unique motion path was generated per broken part and animated procedurally.
The pedal were modeled manually and copied five times around the stem at its base to represent something like a flower. The expansion animation of the pedals was done manually and procedurally.
The leaves were also modeled manually and simply scaled to imply growth motion. The long horns were nurbs curves that became "Sweeped" with @pscale attributes controling their profile shapes. Carve node helped animating the length of the curve to represent a growth motion.
This project relied heavily on the usage of "Vellum Solver" in Houdini to add a layer of simulation for a quite natural and realisitc motion on top of everything that was procedurally or manually animated.
Luckily folks at SideFX have done an incredible job of making the vellum set of tools very efficient, performant, approachable and frankly quite fun for animators to use.
The bubbles were done from a bunch of points having their own individual motion paths, with a few layer of @pscale attributes to bring them in from nothing and later make them disaapear as well.
These points became particle emitters later with positive gravity force pulling the points upwards , Also with layers of @pscale animation based on @age and @life attributes. The points were converted to VDB and with comibination of noise deformers available, Something nice resembling bubbles were achived.
However I ended up using this Bubble mesh as an particle emitter once again just to get those very small and higher frequency of bubbles to get the behaviour of the effect even closer to realism. This pass of particles were rendered as simple particles since they're too small for any surface flucuation visible on screen from the distance.
After the animation and simulations are done, There are usually problems such as geometries intersecting or penetrating into each other which sometime with a manual fix can be addressed, One example of a solution here would be Shot Sculpting, Which is a proccess of manually tweaking the geometry for each particular frame and animated it's effects throughout time, Brining it in when needed and out when not. Here in Houdini "Edit" and "Blendshape" nodes worked perfectly to Edit and sculpt particular problematic frames and animate the influence of each fix blendshape targets.
Besides the pedals and leaves, The rest of the color maps were generated procedully using a combination of attributes and Anold's utility shaders.
Arnold used for rendering once again, And Fusion for compositting.