The Reef Rock

PERSONAL WORK (showreel project)

[What is the Showreel project ? After spending 4 years as a full time Nuke Compositor and 1 year studying Modeling and Animation, I had no more Motion Design works that were recent and showed my current skills. So I decided to spend a little less than 3 months to create a variety of little projects that would make a full showreel once put together. It has been quite challenging to come up with so many different concepts that I would be able to do from scratch in such a short amount of time, but I’ve learnt a lot during the process]

Some times ago, I found this pretty interesting tutorial on youtube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5dLBjHdxxg, I thought it would be a nice exercise to test de volume mesher of Cinema 4D. The technique I used to build the shape is the same as mentioned in the tutorial, but, in order to put a little bit of my knowledge in this piece, I spend most of the time in the texturing/shading.

I wanted to have something that looks like a reef rock and on the web I found some images of pretty cool purple ones. I used them as reference to create my own. My worst regret on this project is that I wasn’t able to create an “under the sea” ambiance with nice water caustic and good “atmosphere”. So, in order not to lose the little time I had, I decided to move on and put them outside water… kind of like if they were on a “rocky beach”.

On the final result, it looks like a timelaps of a growing rock… I’m not sure if this could exist on earth, so I wonder if maybe this has been shot on an other planet… I wonder…

Modeling : Cinema 4D (Volume Mesher)
Animation : Cinema 4D (Mograph)
Lighting / Shading / Rendering : Redshift
Compositing : Nuke