CG & Art Portfolio
NICOLE RAGER
CG WORK
Sakura Station
Self-improvement project for 2019. After being out of CG for a couple years, I decided to challenge myself to re-learn and improve as much as possible. I tackled almost all aspects of the pipeline- sets modelling, cloth simulation, grooming, character and set shading, lighting, and compositing. I am responsible for all aspects of this image other than the character basemesh (she is the free rig Ruby by Amine Kefi), and the schoolbag model (by chotomumu). The textures are a mix of procedural and painted maps made in Substance Painter. The individual lights and fog were rendered as separate AOVs and composited in Nuke. The dust particles, god rays, and DOF were created in Nuke. My future goal for this project is to render it with a camera animation, but unfortunately my current machine is not powerful enough to do more than single frame renders, so I'm looking into cloud rendering.
Software & Plugins: Maya, Xgen, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Marvelous Designer, Nuke
Rendered with RenderMan 23.1
Lighting AOV Layers
Xgen Guides
Monowheel
Assignment two from VSFX 350 (Procedural Modelling and Animation).
The goal was to recreate an real or fictional mechanical object and animate it using only expressions in Houdini. Modelling, shading, texturing, animation, and lighting all in Houdini 12.1.
Based on the monowheel from the 2005 Katsuhiro Otomo film Steamboy.
Spring 2013
The initial concept sketch I did after gathering screenshots and reference from the film to guide my modelling and animation.
Click to expand
Click to expand
Moon Rabbit Snowglobe
Snow globe modelled and textured in Maya 2014 and rendered with RenderMan.
Lit with the RenderMan Environment Light as an exercise in how RenderMan handles HDRI lighting and saving colorbleeding and occlusion information in point maps.
Original concept based on Japanese Otsukimi imagery.
Fall 2013
Snow globe based on the "Otsukimi" (harvest moon-viewing) tradition in Japanese culture. The snow globe and table were modelled and shaded in Maya 2014. It was lit using IBL- Renderman Studio's environment light with point-based occlusion and colorbleeding (approximate raytracing).