Amaryllis Breakdown
By collaborating with a team of 3, this project will include 3 production-ready creatures in the span of nine weeks. The three fantasy animals include a cat/dragon, small dragon, and metallic bird. I’ve been drawing and developing this creature in particular for years so I’m very excited to see it envisioned in 3D, the cat is inspired by many animals including a Chinese dragon, serval cat, and maned wolf. The creature has nine heart chambers in its neck, one for each life and has gemstones on it’s face, similar to the style of the 2 other creatures. It took me two weeks to sculpt the cat creature and one week to re-topologize the character. I am currently working on the bird sculpt.
Sculpt & textures: Madison Snow. Technical Artist: Nhat Anh Phan & Madison Snow. Optimization & pipeline: Madison Snow & Josephine Ikehara. Rig: Amanda Rabade. Concept art: Madison Snow & Olivia Irwin.
Bird Model: Madison Snow.
This was a great challenge to combine my hard-surface modeling skills with organic ZBrush sculpting abilities.
Concept art: Austin Bookman.
A lot of research and development went into the project. I learned a lot in addition to 3d modeling, topology, and UV unwrapping when preparing a production-ready character for animation, I also developed my skills for effects. This included experimenting with particle effects and RBD. My team wanted to challenge ourselves by also including footage from real life. I believe I have a better understanding of a film about fantastical creatures because of the different aspects I explored.
EFFECTS
Below displays experimenting with particle effects and my work diving into my RBD to create broken columns.
ANIMATION
Some fun with character animation!
TRADITIONAL ART & 3D MODELING
In addition to sculpting and designing two of the characters, I did some prop work and illustration! Lastly, I have displayed below some behind the scenes from shooting where our team utilized an hdri camera, blue screen, chrome balls, and professional camera.
COMPOSITING
Below displays the process of the process that went into compositing a home for the dragon creature. For the first steps, we used the app PolyCam to scan the tree that we shot, as well as the textures. I then took the tree model into ZBrush and defined the hole for the tree. In addition to this, I 3D modeled a floor plane for the creature by using out footage as reference to match the pine needles. Lastly, I photoshopped the plate in the final image by integrating a render of the my tree model in Houdini.
