Pyxl
Personal Project
Misfit Mice
Lead Character FX
Secondary Roles: Story Board, Vis Dev, Compositing
Click image to watch the short.
Misfit Mice Animated Short
During the spring 2015 semester at Clemson University, our team worked this animated short for our graduate program, Digital Production Arts. During this semester, we learned new tools, processes, and how to work in a production style environment. Our short is to be a small glimpse of what could be a larger picture. Our requirements for this short were there had to be a rodent with fur, there had to be food, and it had to be a certain length. We came up with an idea of super mice. The background to this story is a high school kid who has been bullied most his life decides to take his passion with super hero comics to the next level. Using tools in his father's basement, he constructs five different cages to give super powers to five different mice. During this short, you get a glimpse at the mice Tag, who is the story's main character. Tag is seen waking up in his cage only to realize the kid left cheese on the counter, not knowing he has any powers yet Tag tries to bang on the glass to get the cheese. After Tag hits the glass, he awakens his teleporting powers and poofs out of the cage. Next you see Tag appear next to the cheese. Tag sees the cheese and it is now the only thing he cares about. Before he is able to touch the cheese, Tag realizes something is going on behind him and when he turns around, he realizes he has been a part of something he can't fathom....
Fur FX
Our team chose to use Houdini to create the fur for our character. Although I have seen Maya be the more popular choice for fur rendering, Houdini worked best for our pipeline capabilities. Since our mouse was modeled in Maya, in order to successfully have a furry creature, we exported alembics of the mouse after a shot of animation was completed. During this process, the alembic is brought into Houdini where the fur can be added and edited however needed.
Rendering the Fur
During the process of grooming and rendering the fur, one bottle neck that was always reached was how long the renders took with using Ray Tracing or Deep Shadow Maps. We figured out a way to get shadows to appear under the fur of the mouse without having to wait too long.
The way this was done was brought the geometry in a object merge and delete all the unused attributes. Next all the fur curves except the base points were deleted. This helps limit the amount of information going into the volume creation. After this, a VDBsmooth SOP is used to keep the fur from casting uneven shadows. A down side to this is the viewport is bogged down from calculating the fur shadow. To take care of this problem two null nodes are added. One for rendering the shadow during render time and a display null used so the shadows are not visible or calculated in the view port.