"Succumb" Project Exploration

Sirens have always been a favorite mythical creature of mine. Their inherent villainy, and associations with deception, allure, and temptation through the female form. This project was intended to explore this concept of a human succumbing to the temptations of a sirens call, but instead of being victim to its evil, she is instead becoming it.

Scales Effect

This project started with the scale animation. There are many ways that I thought about approaching this transformation, such as having them simply spawn over the skin, fade in, etc. But I wanted it to feel somewhat more natural and unsettling, which is why I opted for them to grow out from under the top layer of skin, which dissolves/ flakes away into the water around it.

For the spreading of the scales, I utilized the system for the built in pyro spread to create an animated attribute (@temperature) that spreads over the geo. With that, I was able to adjust the rotation and scale values of the points on the geo according to the value of the temperature attribute using VEX.

Referencing @pscale to @temperature allowed the scales to grow as the attribute spread, and utilizing quaternions allowed them to rotate outwards.

After getting the vex-based animation created, I then combined it with the reference geo of the leg using VDBs to create the effect that they were growing into the skin and interacting with it.

And finally, I added a vellum tear to this VDB-merged layer that is simulated to activate according to the same @temperature spread, but retimed so it occurs after the scale animation plays. This left me with 3 layers: The scales, the leg, and the skin layer, which I combined, textured procedurally, and rendered in Karma.

Cloth and Hair

For the full body shots, I began by creating the cloth and hair sims. I wanted to focus on creating the wet sticky look on the character when outside the water, which I did so by increasing friction, damping, and slightly multiplying gravity to exaggerate weight.

Her hair outside of the water was similarly adjusted to have the appearance of being wet, with little wind movement, clumping, and slightly increased gravity and friction to appear to have more weight to it.

For the underwater shots, I created the flowy fabric by removing gravity, and adding wind with gentle noise to emulate waves moving the dress. Similar wind was applied to her hair, where I also removed the clumping effect that was applied when outside the water.

The model and animation I sourced from metahuman and mixamo, but like usual I tweaked the mixamo animation a lot to match what I had in mind.

Water Simulation

I looked into Houdini 20’s new ocean procedurals, yet did not utilize the entire workflow of the ocean since it was only partly visible. I primarily used it for the animation of the water waves.

Legs Fusing

The legs fusing into the tail provided a few obstacles. After merging with a VDB, they appeared leg-like with a noticeable knee. To combat this, I made a basic mermaid tail shape out of a cylinder and bend deforms. While the legs were in the process of combining, I had the mermaid tail grow and combine with them as well, then shrunk down the legs to fade into the tail.

I then used a spreading @Cd attribute to create a mask for a procedural shader in karma to show the growing scales.

This personal project allowed me to practice my skills in cloth, hair, and water sims, as well as VDBs and VEX coding, which I look forward to continue developing and adding onto.