KISHAN THAKRAR
A LEVEL ART PHOTOGRAPHY PORTFOLIO
CGI Leaf Droplet Scene
THE ANIMATION PROCESS
FINAL OUTCOME
1. In a new C4D scene, I loaded into the editor background a hi-res image of a leaf, found on the internet. I switched the camera to Top view to allow me to use the image as a stencil. Here the leaf image is being used as a guide for the next steps.
2. I placed a plane object on top of the leaf, and then adjusted its size so that the entire leaf would be covered by it. I made the object editable and switched to point mode so I could reshape the plane to fit the leaf more accurately. As shown on the left, I subdivided the plane to allow me to get more precision in following the shape of the leaf.
3. The following screenshots show the plane in perspective view and then secondly with HyperNURBS applied to it which subdivides the edges of the plane and gives the smooth, curved look that can be seen. The third image shows the UV Mesh from the top view ready
to be edited.
4. Here, I add a new material which will be the leaf material, to the plane in the UV Mesh editor. I then load the image of the leaf into the material.
5. I copied the mesh from the actual Plane object onto the material to its right, which essentially makes the material follow the shape of the leaf projected frontally; which will work with this image.
6. The first two screenshots show the UV Mesh exported into Photoshop, with the leaf image imported into a layer beneath. I aligned this image under the mesh. I then exported this back to Cinema 4D, and the perspective view on the bottom right shows the leaf texture applied to the image. A problem arised where the edges of the leaf had black spots where I earlier used an alpha to mask the finer details when creating the initial shape of the leaf.
7. These screenshots show me editing alpha channels and this removed the unwanted extra black parts on the edges, leaving the crisp leaf edge.
8. I created the fold in the leaf, using a 'Bend' effector. I rotated this to cause bending in the right direction. I adjusted the settings until I could increase strength and the leaf would fold more, as shown on the left. I then rotated the entire leaf and reset the axes so that it would be facing upwards when each side is equally folded.
9. I added a 2nd 'Bend' effector, that would affect the curvature of the leaf, because from reference photos I noticed the leaves curved a lot due to gravity. I wanted this to follow the shape of the leaf as best as possible for ultimate realism, so I resized the Bend object to fit around the leaf as close as possible, shown below.
10. I rotated and adjusted this bend effector to give a realistic curvature in the leaf, referring to my reference photos I took.
11. Click on these screenshots to enlarge. To add raindrops, I used a cloner object and created a small sphere, which I set to clone on the surface of the leaf object, using a Random effector to assign random positions, scales and rotations to each cloned sphere. I repeated this process for a much smaller sized clone (which can be seen in the latter of the images) to add further realism, because in my reference photos the leaves tended to hold different sized droplets of water.
12. I added a metaball effector to the droplets, which gives them a liquid-like property so that when two collide/overlap, they morph into one shape. These can be seen in some of the screenshots below. This was to replicate what happens when two raindrops collide in real life; my reference images showed that the two would combine into one raindrop.
13. I selected one of the cloned droplets using the MoGraph selection tool (because each raindrop would not be otherwise independently selectable), and I keyframed movements of this droplet, to let it roll off the edge of the leaf. I used reference footage I had taken of a raindrop falling off a leaf, which allowed me to use realistic keyframes.
14. I adjusted the camera position to how I thought would best fit the background image. I also adjusted depth of field focussing settings.
15. I increased the strength of the bend deformer to give the leaf more of a curve, to match with the background image I was going to use.
16. Lastly, I created the raindrop texture which was essentially a transparent material with a refractive index set to 1.33 which replicates the index of actual water. I also added reflection and specular, which I edited and adjusted to look most realistic in the current lighting setup.
I then edited the scene in After Effects, compositing the leaf superimposed onto the background image. The result can be seen at the top of the page.
CGI LEAF DROPLET SCENE
