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DESIDERATUM

Character Modeling | 3D Environments | Rigging & Animation | Compositing & Color | Houdini Vellum Simulation

Fig 1: Desideratum test render

Desideratum is the title of an in-progress body-horror animation project centered on physicalizing the collective unconscious; here, amidst a mangled, babbling zeitgeist, ideas are born of flesh and blood, embarking upon a pilgrimage to infiltrate the body of thought.

Breakdown

Desideratum's stylized-realistic rendering style makes it one of my most ambitious personal projects; the piece's fleshy, porous environment, and each of its two characters were sculpted, retopologized, and textured through a combination of procedural and hand-painted means. Each of these assets saw their normals baked to images, and low-resolution models used to save on compute.

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Likewise, with each render taking precious hours, even days to complete, a flexible post-processing workflow was of high priority. As such, the contributions of each light source were rendered individually, and then additively comped onto each other in Davinci Resolve. This yields a physically accurate end-result, while preserving the ability to tweak each light source's intensity and color. 

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Fig 2: Character turntable

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Fig 3: Light layers compositing demonstration

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Fig 4: Houdini flesh sim node-tree & viewport

Also worth noting is the use of Houdini Vellum to simulate sinewy skin ripping apart in Desideratum; the emerging character's animated mesh was brought into Houdini as an FBX file, and then used to drive a Vellum grain simulation. The glue constraints between grains were then used to generate connective sinews, and meshed from a VDB.

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