Little sunflower that fell in love with the moon
This is the character from the short film ”Little sunflower that fell in love with the moon" designed and supervised by director Antonio Padovan and developed by master GC XXII Bigrock as the first thesis.
Following the pipeline , the character was conceived in preproduction dep, they made the maquette then the character were 3D modeled and send to me for texturing, look dev, lighting and final render. For the character I used some photos of sunflowers as reference, trying to recreate the same substrate conditions of the petals, stem, leaves, giving importance to direction of light, the translucency of the elements and the projected shadows’s color.
The color map was made entirely in Photoshop, in some cases slightly by including occlusion as normal map support and to avoid the use of displacement of animated elements. In the most subtle elements there is a map of translucency which describe venous parts, work simultaneously with a dynamic ramp oriented as direction of light to simulate the thickness and giving color to the shadows. The sunflower bud details are half modeled and half regulated by displacement map to simulate the seeds that gradually will hatch into petals. Fresnel effect was applied to stem to simulate its sub surface with a second lighter color at the ends. Finally on rendering stage, I set the lighting of some shot simulating the alternation of day and night on sunflower.
