Sprouting Spirit tells the story of a young girl named Maple, who reminisces about the time she spent with her magical companion Cornelius. Through their adventures in imaginary worlds, she learns to overcome her fears. Watch the final film at the bottom of the page!
I was the procedural modeling lead, and the rendering & compositing technical director for the project. My main responsibilities on the project were:
Procedural modeling and animation of all the plants in Houdini and Speedtree
R&D for hair and fur simulations in Maya
Setup of the rendering and compositing pipeline in Maya and Nuke
Rendering with Arnold and Redshift
Compositing in Nuke
Tool development for integrating the motion capture pipeline into our Maya pipeline with Python
Volumetric lighting in Maya
Various modeling, lighting, and layout tasks in Maya
Our story was developed from concept and pre-production through completion over the course of nine months as a senior capstone project at Drexel University. Between our core team of 6 students, we built six environments - including a full city, detailed garden, and three imaginary landscapes. We built, rigged, and animated three characters, each with their own clothing and hair simulation pipelines. We used a combination of motion capture and hand animation for the final show.
We worked collaboratively with a game development team to build an animated short and a video game that take place with the same characters in the same world. Learn more about the project at our website, www.sproutingspiritgame.com.
Watch the completed project here!