Freschrenders

Microcosm - Work in Progress #1

Added 2025-07-23 03:20:47 +0000 UTC

Shot 1 Animated Preview

I've been working on getting the animation done for the first shot recently and that has been a BIT of a hassle since I've had some technical difficulties along the way. However, I can sufficiently say that I've completed the animation portion of the first shot. Take a look below!

Animation

This is one of the more fluid animation I've done. I'm really trying to nail down secondary motion and details that I normally wouldn't put in. I do this by using the NLA editor to layer different keyframes on top of each other. Each layer plays a different role! For example, the Arm_LEFT layer is responsible for controlling the left arm. This is good if I wanted to increase or decrease the influence (amount of movement) that the layer has over the arm itself.

The same thing goes for the Main layer itself. Instead, this layer is responsible for the rest of the body and the primary movement.

Finally, adding the Secondary Movement layer in gives the look you see in the preview!

Basic Environment

I've been using Houdini again to try and create a landmass. This is a bit of a challenge since heightfields only support vertical displacment in one direction. The solution I've went for gives me decent results along with a lot of control over the UVs and textures.

The node setup looks complex but honestly it really isn't. The main challenge was combining the top and bottom half of the heightfields.

I accomplished this by essentially creating a "cookie cutter" object that I could use to boolean (or cut) out the shape of the bottom of the island from the top so they could stick together.

This allowed me to then literally fuse the vertices together, then remesh with a VDB to create the final look.

And that's all for this WIP! Sorry this took a little longer to put together. I had some... epiphanies after the stream on Sunday and wanted to make some adjustments before I released my workflow. I should have another WIP by next week!