Month: September 2025

Combining other shots & Exporting

I trimmed and put the other shots together based on my storyboard then graded them based on my grade for the final shot. I also tried tracking and stabilsing some of these shots but I didnt like how they looked and decided to use the raw camera movement instead.

I originally planned to have the mycelium slowly moving in two other shots but due to time constraints I decided to just polish the final shot instead.

Siggraph Rainbow Conference

This week I also attended the london siggraph Rainbow Conference where I gained a lot of insight on the VFX indusustry from talks about the VFX behind Nosferatu and new features in Houdini 21. In the Houdini workshop they also talked about new Gaussian Splatting features, this will be usefull to look into for my Thesis on this topic.

Importing render AOV’s into Nuke

After setting up my render settings in Houdini I had a useful set of AOVs such as diffuse, reflection and shadows, this allows me to edit the look of my render in comp without going back into Houdini and rendering out 700 frames every time I want to make a change.

Adding grain, blur, colour and lightwraps

After editing my AOVs and doing a first grade on the CG render I then added motion blur, grain and lightwraps to try and match the CG as closely as I could to the plate then merged them together.

Houdini commercial work

With my more refined skills in Houdini I was able to gain a small freelance role creating some shots for an advert. I was tasked with creating a milk thistle flower with animations and a water dropplet sim. I started by using the same core structure I learned from my previous flower project. Unfortunately as this was a very complex flower I had to do a lot tweaking and research into Houdini and the flowers structure, and go through many itteraions and feedback loops with the client as this flower has a lot of different varieties and stages. To create the water dropplet I blasted a single petal then created a sphere that would be used as the water, I then had to animate the petal moving and bending as if there was water flowing down it, I also used a CHOP network to add realistic bouncing and blend my animation realisticly. I transfered these animations into Solaris and rendered out first pass motion drafts to get feedback from.

Added HDRI lighting captured from filming location

To get realistic lighting and be able to match my render to the plate I used a HDRI that I captured on the filming location with a 360 camera from ORB, there was not much editing that needed to be done to this as the 360 cameras exported files were allready setup correctly, I just needed to tweak the values until the lighting looked and felt correct. I then added an area light that matched the real world location that the light would of been coming from to get some more defined shadows and specular highlights.

Creating materials for mycelium

I had quite a lot of trouble creating the materials for the mycelium. I wanted to have the displacement and colour change based on attribute values, such as having the colour and size of the mycelium corilate to the age of the animation so the larger parts would be a more darker / dryer colour and larger and the sub tendrils be smaller and have a greener more fresh colour. When creating the animation I allready had the values such as curveu that gets the length of the curve and perimeter, an attribute I created that controls the spawning of the smaller tendrils off the larger one. Converting these attributes from points to primitives and from the SOP workspace into the Solaris USD workspace had some issues but I was eventually able to access the values within the material editor and use them to influence the displacement noise and colour ramp.

Displacement maps

Lighting and test renders

Once I had the materials setup I make a basic lighting and render setup so I could render out 1 frame to test compositing in Nuke while I setup the final lighting and render settings and wait for the long render time.

In order to achive shadows on the wall behind the mycelium I used the wall mesh as a holdout, in Solaris there is a node that does this by routing in the render mesh then the shadow mesh and adds the shadows that would be appearing into an AOV channel on the rendered exr sequence.