week 2
During week two we have taken the feedback we got during our pitch and each tried to further develop our concepts as well as conduct our own research and development. Each person was in charge of things related to their role. Dee did modeling and started on textures of the bottle itself. Emma tested camera moves as well as lighting. Thalia worked on the lookdev rig as well as testing flip fluids. My main goal was to develop and test the vellum cloth and the pyro further.
Starting with cloth I did more research into references and tried to add detail to the simulation.
From here I increased the subdivisions on my cloth simulation in Houdini and started going through iterations. It was a challenge to capture the bendiness and stillfess of such fabrics, without letting it slide on the ground or get caught on the bottle, In the end I ended up with something close to what i want - I slides of of the bottle with an extra constraint. It does't slide on the floor (thought it still jitters). The main things to fix about what I have now would be the clipping and jittering. Overall I am happy with my progress on the cloth.
In the end I was able to reduce the sliding to the minimum and render out a preview.
Next - for the pyro the main feedback was not making it overbearing, following reference and adding glitter. Because of this I started my RnD by creating a reference mood-board.
The main thing that helped me solve my problems with my pyro was increasing the scale. While the cloth is simulated at the original scale, I had to increase the bottle size by 100 to achieve the needed movement in the smoke. I figured out that the thickness of the smoke, that contributes to the elegance of the bottle is mainly controlled by the volume shader, si i experimented with the different potential versions. I also scattered points in the smoke to imitate glitter.
Finally I did an extra render with finer detail, lighter smoke and lighter colors. The voxel size is still too big for the purposes of time management.