I would like to explore this concept of string or hair growing out of the person, I think it would be really fun and I understand the foundations to make it work.

Here's my mocap dance for this design, I tried to choose something that doesn't have a lot of overlap because it starts to look messy as the blades of grass start to overlap. Also this looked like a nice flowy dance to suit the tree idea.

Using what I learnt from the module 3 class exercise I would like to explore a magma look.

I liked the arm movements and 'wave' like movements and felt like it would suit the magma design.

To begin my prototypes I would like to break down the steps to creating the desired outcome. First I would have to create points and then add a scatter node to spread them across the surface. I can also adjust the density of the 'hair/string' in the scatter node, this will come in handy when deciding how many strands I would like and will make it easy to adjust later down the track.

Here is a quick visualisation of how the prototype process will go and my thought process behind the planning.

The main thing I will need to research for this concept is how to make the strands react to gravity and movement so that they flow with the movements.

Here are my completed learning modules for this week.

This week I will continue prototyping and working through the modules.

This is two versions of my prototype, the first on I used vellum before reading the comment left from last week which said not to use vellum.

The second version is just a simple prototype without any gravity implemented to it.

This week I'll be applying my prototypes to the mocap dances and making adjustments where necessary.

For my 'hair' one after some playing around I decided that I wanted to make it more of a tree or bush so I made the adjustments and ended up really liking the results. This also suits the nature and dance theme more.

I decided to experiment with shorter strands and I think it looks a lot tidier but it looks better as a bush or grass person this way rather than a tree.

This one still needs some refining throughout the week but I am happy with it so far. I need to explore how to get the magma to flow downwards as at the moment it flows from her feet up to her head which looks wrong.

Now that my main prototypes are done the next step is to start rendering.

Here's my first lot of renders for my tree, I feel like this one would have been a lot better as a video as the dance doesn't have a lot of movement so the still renders don't do it justice. Unfortunately I've been having trouble will rendering the whole sequence and I don't think I will have time to keep trying to work it out.

I ended up getting the video working but it came out very jittery, I think I made the amplitude too high on my pop wind maybe but I couldn't see the jitter in Houdini because there was so much lag.

I had a lot of trouble rendering this one, for some reason whenever I tried to do a render sequence it would just render the first frame of the sequence repeatedly no matter where I started in the sequence.. This was not an output error as I tried copy and pasting the mantra output that I used for the tree animation and it still continues. After spending hours trying to work it out I eventually decided to just do the 5 still renders instead.

This was a shame because I was really excited to see this one animated.

I was also able to experiment adding a bit of a glow to the magma which was cool to experiment with.

I ended up finishing my other assessment early so I went through and rendered every frame individually to get my video, unfortunately it doesn't look as good as I hoped as the magma moves way too fast.

However I am glad I was able to finalise my work.

At first I was going to explore the harmony between fire and ice but after listening to the poem a few times I decided to look more into the emotion represented by the elements. That is why my mood board has a few different themes incorporated in it.

For my story board I wanted to really push the emotions of the elements so I added the scenes with the person exploding into fire and then also the tear at the end. The fire is meant to represent anger, rage and riot whereas the ice is cold, sad and lonely.

Here I learnt to make a flipbook so I could have an idea of what the fire would look like. I plan on making a mock-up video from flipbook clips to see what the final result will look like before I render everything. I also did one still render at a higher quality, I think if I can leave myself with enough time to render I can produce and even higher quality.

This week I worked some more on my fire scenes and put together what I have so far in premier just to see how it looks together. Next week I will be looking at ice simulations and also the tear drop at the end.

The main thing I want to fix is the spacing in the 'world split' scene as I would like to have them further apart.

Here I have two versions of my ice sim one with a black background and one with light grey, originally I wanted the background black but I've decided I want the grey instead.

I also did a OpenGL render of this scene and my only problem is that the mist looks black and I can't work out how to fix it.

I have had a lot of trouble this week with rendering my flames, no matter what I do or how many videos I follow the flames look white or very undersaturated, this only happens with the openGL renderer. After searching for solutions for 2 days I decided it was time to cut my losses or I wouldn't have anything to submit.. So my OpenGL render hasn't got colour in the flames but I am going to do some mantra renders to demonstrate how they are supposed to look.

This week I also finished the ice sim on my World Split scene which was the last thing I had to do before rendering everything out.

I wish I was more organised during this assessment so that I could have started rendering at the start of the week and then could have asked more questions during class. I will try to take this into account for the next assessment. I also would have liked to be able to do a mantra render because I had a lot of trouble with the OpenGL renderer not showing the colour in the flames and I am not happy overall with the outcome. I also had trouble getting the world split and human fire to look good in the mantra renders.

The only one I was happy with was the ice render but that one still isn't perfect because I didn't make the background grid big enough and i didn't have enough time to re-render it.

This week I mainly decided which assessment I wanted to refine and started mapping out what I wanted to fix.

I have decided to work on assessment 1 because I feel like there is a lot that I could improve on. I will start by fixing my magma dance as that one requires more work than the tree.

This week in class Ivan went through how i could make my magma more realistic using VOPs, after class I watched the recording and made some adjustments and worked on the lighting to get it looking how I wanted it. I was also able to render this week which was great! The only thing I would have liked to change would be getting the rocks to move downwards slowly as if the lava was pouring out of a volcano.

This week I will be working on fixing my tree dance. The main thing that needs work is the jittering in the leaves which might be fixed with a rest node. If that does not work my backup plan is to make a new sequence with a trail effect to get a similar outcome.

Here is the completed video, I am happy with the outcome.

I mainly spent this week preparing for the interview with future deluxe and making sure I was happy with my end result which I am.