Ideas
Sand Garden 3D Animation Process
This Assessment is about creating a procedural geometry that can visualize some emotions following this scope sheet.
My first idea was to so something that can express how depress I was at that moment. But when I start doing research, I just realize that doing something stressful while you are already feeling stress at some point was not a really good idea. And while researching, I found something really calling me and that is a Japanese sand garden.
And since it is a Japanese style garden, I think of one more thing that I had seen a lot in anime or Japanese movies I watched, it is Shishi-odoshi a Japanese water fountain made of bamboo that makes a distinctive clacking sound when it empties water.
Sketch
This is my sketch of what I want to do. On the left top corner is shishi-odoshi, around the edges is the high part which have grass grow randomly, there is rocks in the middle and surround the rock is sand.
Process
I start from searching for models of the shishi-odoshi. Luckily, I found one and I also found rocks models, so I also used it.
I took models I downloaded and arrange it in the Maya and export it as alembic file to import back to Houdini.
To make the mounting part of the garden I use attribute adjust float, choosing noise and adjust it until you see the right spot.
Then I group the red part and plug the mountain node to it, smooth it and give it color.
Scatter some spot of the green area to make grass. I follow this tutorial.
And this is how my grass come out after applying color and add one more layer of darker grass.
Now is the time of trying to make sand particle using the wet sand simulation following this tutorial.
Importing rocks into the scene.
This is how my first try looks like.
I modelled the rake up, import it to maya and using DOP network to make it interact together with the sand then animate the rake. This is how it’s working out.
It doesn’t look nice so I redo it again and adjust it to make it looks nicer. To make it more realistic I need to lower down the size of the sand and this process make the computer work really hard and slow. So I decide to cut down the size to use just only half of it.
Then I’m texturing rocks by using attribute VOP. First attribute VOP was using to make the rocky texture and the second attribute VOP was using for adding color. I used this tutorial as a reference.
Next, I’m doing the flip simulation for the water in the pond and the water fall from shishi-odoshi. Following this tutorial.
At first, I didn’t separate the shishi-odoshi model when I’m using this model as a collision it’s working really hard and taking ages to render so I separate the model out, using just only the animated part where it stored water. This made it works faster. Then, I’m meshing it using particle fluid surface node and apply basic liquid material to it. Following this tutorial.
Next, I added steam to make the water look like hot water. Study from this tutorial.
Next, I added wall around the garden. The wall is made with grid and apply mountain node and give it color. The up part is brown color and near where the grass grow it have some greeny color.
Adding lights and camara then render it! At first, I used Karma to render the scene, but Karma can’t render out the basic liquid material I then using the mantra node instead.
Adding lights and camara then render it! At first I used Karma to render the scene but Karma can’t render out the basic liquid material I then using the mantra node instead.