At sunrise, a pair of great blue herons wakes up as a team of rowers run in lockstep.

HERONS

This shot is inspired by my memory of seeing great blue herons hunting in shallow water during high school rowing practice on Lake Sammamish. The process of creating this simple shot was a learning experience in every aspect of my animation journey.

This shot presented numerous challenges because of the different characters, naturalistic environment. I taught myself to utilize both biped and avian rigging, motion capture retargeting and keyframe animation, texture painting, volumetric rendering, and spent the better part of a night troubleshooting rendering reflections before realizing I had to increase the height of my render window in order to render proper screen space reflections (reflections of objects and light within the camera’s field of view).

My initial composition with this shot had the rowers running along a high horizon line with the herons in the foreground, intending to flatten the image and separate the motion. However, upon composing the shot in this style, I found that it lacked a sense of realism that the animation necessitated. I changed the composition to better reflect how a cameraman would film birds on the water: from far away, at water level, on a telephoto lens.

An early test render using a basic model and set of bones for the heron. I accidentally saved over this file but it ended up being for the best.

BOATS & ROWERS

Boats are deceptively difficult to model in 3D, but my research led me to a fun piece of computer graphics history. The methodology behind bezier curves originates in the historical practice of using weighted “ducks” (small lead weights) to hold flexible strips of wood or in place on a drawing board, allowing designers to create smooth curves by manipulating the positions of the ducks, which are essentially the control points on a curve. Despite this, I chose to not model the boat with splines as that made it more difficult.

Above: Test image of the boat model to check smoothness and test path tracing on reflective surfaces.

Left: Though this shot features rowers only in silhouette, I decided to try some basic biped modeling and rigging for background versions of these characters. The rowers were modeled in a low-poly style to keep things running as smoothly as possible.

Center: A turnaround of a more complex rower head I tested out in the process of making the background models.

Right: 90 degree turnaround of the boat model.

FOLIAGE

I used hand painted textures as well as painted foliage on transparency to populate the scene. I created different levels of detail for foreground, midground, and background assets.