Flowers

The first shot I decided to do where the flower shots. We need 3 variations of these:

• The Bud
• The Blooming
• The Decaying

To help I asked Megan if I could use her flowers that she made for our BBC project, which she was happy to allow. From these I at first looked at the possibility of using NCloth to create a natural flow, but I was unsure how to do this without the petals just dropping and acting like a cloth material. However when I looked into this I caught on quickly that there was not an easy way of implementing NCloth into it without rigging the flower, and even at the the flower needed to be modeled in such a way to allow the rig to work to allow the NCloth to work. This all seemed a tad too complicated for what I wanted to achieve, like there must be an easier way, so I decided to leave this way of doing it.

Having seen what Phillip did for the Easter project for our Monster to achieve his facial expressions, I decided the best way forward might be to use blend shapes. Alec had given us a lecture on this before which I found my notes on, however I make notes horribly so I had to watch a tutorial to refresh my memory and make sense of my cryptic notes. But it was easy to pick up and I was happy to go ahead with this method.

The first one I began to do was the Flower Bud. This seemed a tad easier as this model only had the four petals to alter. Below are the blend shapes I created for it. From this I then key framed the animation, positioned it correctly to a still background of what would be our footage, and then asked Cassie for some feedback on it. Cassie was really happy with the bud animation, and the only thing she said to change was the steam movement in that it was a bit too static, but overall was happy with the animation.

As for the Flower Blooming and Decaying I decided to do this in the same file as it is using the same model, plus I believed the transition between the two would be a bit smoother. Using the timelapse flower references especially for these ones, I again create another series of blend shapes. I then again animated this, and positioned it in a place that might be good for the footage, using a still as a reference. Again I asked Cassie for some feedback, in which again she was overall happy with it, but felt that although the decay part was fine, the bloom part was too static in movement, and again I needed to move that steam more.

*From the feedback given, I made the changes that Cassie asked for as seen below.*

For rendering, first Cassie kindly sat with me showing how to set up the scene as best as possible so then it could be composited well within the scene. The main two main things she talked about where:

• The light – know which direction it is coming from in your footage, then try to replicate at the same intensity/ exposer/ colour. etc. For this we used 3 Area lights, the strongest one being from the right hand side.
• Texture – Make sure it looks really rather than just an image or plastic. Bump maps seem to be of use her for creating noise on the texture. For this we kept to mainly the same texture as was on the model when Megan sent it (one the two of use work on anyways). The colour and ramp where alter to suit the scene more and the colours within it just.

I applied a similar and texture set up then for the Bloom and Decay shot, and these are two renders of the set up.

Cassie then imported the image sequence into after effects. We had to render out a AO for the bud to try and improve it in the scene (we wanted to do this for the Bloom and Decay but could not get the scenes to match up so had to leave it), but after that, colour correcting and so on they where ready to go. Cassie kindly did a break down of the Bud for an example of how it was implemented into the scene.