3D ANIMATIONS
THE COSMIC SERPENT
"In truth, Ayahuasca is the Television of the Forest." Jeremy Narby
The Cosmic Serpent is an animated short that attempts to entertain some of the observations documented in the book "The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge" authored by Jeremy Narby as well as personal experiences during my time residing in the Amazonian rain forest back in 2016.
It was personal frist attempt at executing an animation project all within Houdini, And it proved to be an incredible solution for this particular piece.
Credits:
Ramtin Ahmadi Art Direction, Execution and Sound
Ali Seiffouri Opening Title and End Credits Design
Don Lucho (Luis Culquiton) Shamanic Icaro Song
Special thanks to:
Don Ron Wheerlock's Elpurguero Reatreat Center, Wiley Grey, Paul Pavel Chámatal, The crew of Kapitari Retreat Center,
Jeremy Narby's amazingly exciting writing which truely sparked this creation.
SideFX Softwares for development of Houdini, The most amazing 3D animiation package out there!
Also Optix Dubai for thier aid, Bringing this piece into a reality infrustructure wise!
And finally my dearest family and friends for none of this would be possible without their never ending love and support.
Ramtin Ahmadi
2017-2018
Technical Overview
The intro Shaman was sculpted quickly in Zbrush in matter of hours, However the smoke blown out of his mouth was a little more challenging, But thanks to Houdini's shelf starter setups I could get going and with enough tweaking I had something that works quite well for that dark night setting.
The nebula shot was a VDB fog that's been modeled and layered using multiple particle simulation technics as well as manual polygonal geometries. A texure then was projected onto the volumetric fog with the help of Arnold Projection shaders.
The snakes were initiated as a "sweeped" NURBS curves, To be converted to VDB to simulate effects such as collisions pressure and inflation against the ground for example.
To build the shader network, RGB map representing a particular color pattern. This map could be used to build and control variaty of shading accpets, such as Color, Roughness.
The snake "Scales" were vector displacement maps that were generated in Houdini using standard copy stamping methods and rendering it from a top orthographical view, And later tweaking the EXR output further in 2D image processing applications (Photoshop, Nuke, etc...)
For the last shot and the fetus inside of earth, A simple geometry was modeled in Maya and with the aid of Maya projection and texture painting I could prepare a base map to start and later fine tune by hand in photoshop to represent an illusion of it in 3D. On top of that the genlt breathing and movement of the baby seem to really have brought the shot to life.
