Making hair and fur in CGI
I caught myself thinking of using a jaguar texture on a model I was testing once, and I realized I didn’t know how to do it. Even though I could use a bump and displacement map, in some way it wouldn’t look so natural because it wouldn’t have actual fur on it. Then, thinking of the character Sulley in Monsters Inc, his fur moves with him while he walks. So how to create fur? How to make it move accompanying the character? Doing a brief research on Maya, I came across the XGen interactive grooming that creates nodes to create hair and fur. That’s definitely a topic I would like to research more.
Using POV framing to create emotion
The POV framing is used to show a first person viewing, and indicates the emotion that the character is feeling. In Quentin Tarantino’s movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the most famous suspense scene, when Cliff gets to the hippie ranch, suspense is created by showing the main character’s first person view.
Creating snow in CGI environment
How to animate believable snow? How to make it fall in all the places without having to model the mass of snow that forms in each object? Doing a brief research I now know that it can be done with particle simulation on Maya. But how does it work? Snow has different properties such as the volume of water in it, if it is wet or dry, if it’s all stuck together or grainy. Here’s a simple tutorial on how snow works, but this theme needs practice to be understood.
How lightning affects the story
How lightning can help portray the plot of the movie. How to choose between having soft or hard, warm or cold light? In the movie Parasite, the warmth and the amount of light helped characterize the social difference between two families. While the poor house had cold temperature lights, the rich one had warm and natural light.
Destroying a famous location
Once, on my last internship, my team had to simulate a drone recording flying over a square in Moscow for the world cup’s opening, but drones were not allowed at the location. They had to model every building that existed in the area in order to make the most accurate simulation. Assuming there’s a movie being shot at a famous location, such as Oxford Street or 5th Avenue, and the director is planning to have an explosion scene at the place. There must be a shot of the location destroyed, but you can’t really destroy the place. What would be the pipeline for creating that scene?