February 27, 2020 | Leaves

Shot 2 and 3 are coming together and we are finally integrating the leaf FX in. Yanni has been working so hard on researching and creating the leaves for shot 2 and 3. She cached out an alembic for me to place into our Maya scene, look dev, and render. Here's the process of how I did it.

Importing the leaf alembic into the scene

Look Development - Leaf FX

The leaves in this shot are very small, therefore I used a simple shader on the leaves. I utilized the aiColorJitter to create variation on the faces of the leaves so that they don't particularly look the same. Here is a screenshot of the hypershade network and the attribute settings I have for the leaves.

Here is a close up render of the leaves with the shader on it.

Rendering

I placed the leaves and it's shadow in different layers and rendered those separately.

Here is a quick playblast of the leaf FX in the scene for shot 3.

Final Thoughts

I'm really excited to see the leaves incorporated in shot 3 and being affected by the portal. Yanni is still working on caching out the leaves for shot 2, but the process will be the same and I will have that for the newest edit for next week's presentation.