Project 3: Fantastical Flower
May 4, 2025 (Week 7)
Fully completed my Project 3. I rendered using Chaos Cloud for both the video and quilt. My stills I decided to render locally at 2k, then I downressed them for the video. I really like my final video, I think it came together well I had a lot of good feedback in the process of making it, and theres even more adjustments I could make now.
May 3, 2025 (Week 6)
My flower, Metal and Wood have fully been textured. The wood needed some texture adjustments to line up with my UV's (Since its tiling). While I wanted to use mari, I did not have enough time to learn it sufficiently for this project. I was not able to replicate what I can in substance there.
Metal Gloss Coat
Flower Base Color (All I need because its emissive rest is shader)
Painted a flowmap for my lava so it should move around better when I offset the UVs. An issue with doing this in VRAY is that UV distortion from what I can tell is only supported on CPU rendering, so I had to switch to that.
I also added some more center rocks and switched my flower from that original picture because I got some feedback that the branches were distracting. Ignore the wireframe on the lava—it's a sim. You can also notice some smoke. To make my render time even higher, I decided to add some smoke!!
These are me building the flower. I did it all in Houdini, took it out, painted it, brought it back, remeshed it, bent it around, cleaned it up, and then saved it. In the end, it's much denser than I'd like, but it works fine with displacement and the UVs, and it's smooth.
After this, I changed up my camera movement a bit. I slowed it down once it was closer to the flower so you could see it for longer. My biggest issue as of now is render times. I'm stuck on CPU rendering because of the shader support, and the glass itself adds 10 minutes to a frame locally. I might shell out a hundred bucks and buy more cloud points.
Test render no denoise.
April 27, 2025 (Week 6)
Higher Quality Still Frame
Low Quality Preview Render
I worked on it more yesterday, Heres my finalized (I think) camera movement. I think I may slow it down more. Videos really low quality, but you can also see a early flowing lava, it needs lots of work. I was thinking now though seeing it play, I will add some camera effects in my final, maybe some wiggle and bloom.
Bloom?
April 27, 2025 (Week 5)
Since we have more time, I decided to export my meshes and texture them in Mari. I still have to learn the program more, though. I have to finalize my materials after that. I still want to work more on the lava and the floor. I have almost finalized my lighting and camera movements. I also decided to switch my aspect ratio like I said I would. I am having issues keyframing the focal distance, but I will worry about that later.
My Lighting setup consists of one spotlight, two area lights, and the sky dome for a fill. Im also using two meshes as light blockers, so I direct my fill more.
I think I have finalized most of my UV's too, Some are just projected, Like the lava terrain and the volcano but those will just be tiled textures and maybe some masks.
I am working on my flower idea and some surrounding rocks. Gotta UV out these too. I wanna add some branches to the flower, maybe vary the petals more, then I'm gonna fully paint it in Mari.
April 21, 2025 (Week 5)
I want to change my aspect ratio to not 16:9, so I have the terrarium more in focus earlier. I also have to animate my lava and add displacement. I have to paint onto my metal areas, which I already UV'd. And the floor, I made a mask for the burn area, but I have no material setup for it yet.
Doing some lava material tests. I added some preview materials for the floor and also added some early preview lighting. I want to work on my glass more, and of course I have to do my flower and my volacno (which is just a base mesh right now)
Doing a test for some fluid siming just to get a good starting point for my lava. UVs are not correct here, id just do them for the final frame and I want to do some material movement instead.
April 20, 2025 (Week 4)
Today im previewing more houdini stuff. I created the lid to my terratrium and added some preview wood floor just to get a sense of my composition. I started making groups and gonna make some preview materials.
I have no lighting setup at all. Gonna do that later. Also gotta do some uvs, but I will wait till I finalize my meshes.
Heres my messy node graph for my terrarium now.
April 16, 2025 (Week 4)
In class today we tried out some AI to flesh out ideas for this project. Since I wasnt as sure what my final project would look like I decided to take a stab at using the AI along with my pre made drawing to see what it could come up with.
Orginial Photoshop Drawing
I do like the versions chatgpt made with my image. With teling it what I wanted it made a very close version to what im picturing. It is different in each version but I think it gives me a starting base for how I want my final to look material wise and interior terrarium wise.
​​​​
​
​​​
​
CHATGPT Versions
April 15, 2025 (Week 4)
Im doing the lava flower, and i want it to be spilling stuffs out.
I've started my wonderful concept drawing, and here's the beginning of the base of the terrariumin Houdini.
April 14, 2025 (Week 4)
For my project 3 I want to do some sort of lava fire flower thing. First I fixd up my project 2. Moved my materials to the side. Im so not sure what im doing for project 3 though.