Overview
Sprouting Spirit tells the story of a young girl named Maple, who reminisces about the time she spent with her magical companion Cornelius. Through their adventures in imaginary worlds, she learns to overcome her fears.
Role
I was the procedural modeling lead and the rendering & compositing technical director. My main responsibilities included:
- Procedural modeling and animation of all plants in Houdini and SpeedTree
- R&D for hair and fur simulations in Maya
- Setup of the rendering and compositing pipeline in Maya and Nuke
- Rendering with Arnold and Redshift
- Compositing in Nuke
- Tool development for integrating the motion capture pipeline into Maya with Python
- Volumetric lighting in Maya
Process
Our story was developed from concept through completion over nine months as a senior capstone project at Drexel University. Between our core team of 6 students, we built six environments including a full city, detailed garden, and three imaginary landscapes. We built, rigged, and animated three characters, each with their own clothing and hair simulation pipelines. We used a combination of motion capture and hand animation for the final show.
We worked collaboratively with a game development team to build an animated short and a video game that take place with the same characters in the same world.
