The Puzzled Traveler

In the Spring of 2022, I worked with several colleagues on an animated short called “The Puzzled Traveler”. This was a section of a broader movie where a researcher found a magical book that would bring him into another world. I contributed to this project with the effects and room design, and so I wanted to go through some of my process and parts that I worked on.

Magical Effects

Our magical effect was inspired by auroras and was decided to be a particle-based effect. The key purpose of this effect was to transition between the two different room states and to seem magical enough. Because of the two different rooms with different objects, this meant that I needed several different render passes in order to create the full effect. The normal and decrepit rooms were rendered from Maya with Renderman, and the particles were rendered from Houdini with Mantra. The rooms were identical using Shotgrid in our pipeline in order to make sure that the light would properly reflect off of all surfaces, including those created by displacement maps. The character was removed from this shot for presentation in this portfolio.

At early moments where we would only see one room, this included three render passes. One of the room, one of the particles, and one of the emitted light.

After the wave of particles lifts up enough, the floor would begin to “dissolve” and be replaced with the decrepit version of the room. The render passes for this full effect included two versions of the room, two particle passes, two emission passes, and a mask pass to transition between the rooms. Every pass that we had from the “normal” room now required a pass that included the objects that were not originally in the room (moss / tree).

Ruined Room State / Moss

Originally, we had planned on having a researcher that opens a book and is warped to a fantasy version of his room that is “overgrown” with some sort of strange moss-like substance. While we were originally unsure about what we could do to make this room seem “foreign”, I suggested the idea of having small, medium, and large elements in the room. The large element was a tree bursting through a door done by another member, the medium element was intended to be vines but was later cut, and the small element was a moss-like substance that grows all over the room. The moss was done in two parts, with both geometry and surface-level moss.

The geometry moss was done in Houdini on a VDB version of the room to ensure that moss could “pass” from one object to another in the room. It was important to us that the moss looks like it has “grown” over the room rather than each individual object. This “growth” was done using Pyro nodes that would spread the moss over points on the surface of the VDB and allow me to fine-tune what type of noise pattern the moss would grow in. I could choose source points for the moss to start “growing” and stop the moss growth whenever a satisfactory amount of moss was present. At later points we fine-tuned the behavior of the moss by not allowing it to grow on the bottom of objects and painting other areas where we did not want the moss to grow to keep the pathways for our character clear.

In addition to the “geometry” moss, I also created a set of smart materials in Substance Painter that would allow us to create “surface level moss” that would go on objects in our scene. The books were spared as a part of our narrative, but the surface level moss went on all of the other objects in our scene. This smart material included a purple dirt and some light / dark green moss that would go over everything. The purple dirt was made to match the outside world drawing and the green moss was made to add normal variation and match the agreed upon color of the final moss.