ALENA MEALY
JUNIPER'S BALCONY
A TWO PART SAGA
Created for my Texture 4 class, which covered the Mari workflow of texturing hero characters in a film pipeline. This piece I wanted to return to as it was something I felt needed to be seen all the way through.
Later down the road I was approached with an opportunity to collaborate with a friend and fellow Gnomon student Misha Draganuic, who is responsible for the Hair and Environment simulation, breathing back into a project I thought I had put behind me and completed!
During this process, we worked together to troubleshoot and boy did we troubleshoot. The problem we encountered the most was that the groom itself would not have rendered in the time we needed it to, especially considering all the subsurface to account for with the flowers and rest of the scene.
Since we could not use a render farm and were pressed for time, Misha took on the responsibility to recreate the groom using Refshift and Houdini, and we transferred the lights from the scene and replicated everything so we could later comp it all together using Nuke.
SOMETHING ORIGINAL
ORIGINAL CONCEPT
After an infinite amount of inspiration from films like Encanto and Tangled, this character was my first stylized character created, and it felt only right that I make her a Princess on her balcony.
While the requirements for the class at the time was to focus on creating a bust- because I chose to not to go in the hyper realistic direction I wanted to make sure I really pushed the composition and overall feel to the shot.
MODELING
Creating Juniper was a great time, I wanted to keep to soft tapered shapes and really place emphasis on her eyes and eye shape. She is meant to embody and unearthly beauty with hair that's almost iridescent. Most of my references for her were from young Japanese and Korean girls, trying to lock in the shape language along the way.
POSING
LIGHTING
GROOMING
I think this project may have been the key to my deep interest in grooming! Since Juniper is stylized, I knew that I had some flexibility as to how her groom could look. I tried out various iterations and styles, and ultimately landed on a blend of braids and wavy hair.
The original goal was for her hair to have a windswept look, however I planned initially to only create a still! It was so great to see my piece come to life the way she was intended in the end!
I knew a good portion of my time would be spent on the face and head, so creating a baseline for the fur was my first step for the body, legs arms and feet, then controlling the clumps with attribute painting. Then I would use that initial steam to then later build upon to get some breakup in direction and add some randomization.
HAIR COLOR TEST : SILVER
HAIR COLOR TEST : BRUNETTE
ENVIRONMENT
I created the bougainvillea flowers by taking the atlas of flowers from Megascans and using quad draw to polymodel out the petals.
Later I combined them and added thickness to them, and then plugged that into Speed Tree!
COMPOSITING
I knew a good portion of my time would be spent on the face and head, so creating a baseline for the fur was my first step for the body, legs arms and feet, then controlling the clumps with attribute painting. Then I would use that initial steam to then later build upon to get some breakup in direction and add some randomization.