“Medusa and the Pilot” is a short animated trailer for a hypothetical film and was produced as a senior thesis project by a team of seven students, including myself. I acted as the primary foliage artist on the team, and was responsible for modeling and texturing a variety of medium and small bushes and weeds, as well as grasses, groundcovers, and vines.
Our thesis team was loosely split into two jurisdictions: the 2D side handled 2D character animation plates and the 3D side handled 3D environments, set dressing, and camera integration. As a 3D foliage artist, I handled the organization of plant models, materials, and foliage assets within Unreal. All assets I created were modeled in Maya. Textures were painted in Krita, but kept very simple according to style guidelines and in order to avoid muddying future post-processing.
Above is an arrangement of some of the assets I created for the project: lit, unlit, unlit wireframe, and lit with post-processing, rendered in Unreal Engine 5. The post-processing material I used for this arrangement is my own, and was not used in the thesis film.
Lit and unlit wireframe turntables of some assets created for the project.
The 3D team was also tasked with fitting the composition of our 3D environments around our 2D animation plates. In some cases, new asset variants had to be created in order to better integrate—for instance, characters lying in grass required us to make a bent grass that was “displaced” by the character.
All 3D artists were involved in set dressing for a specific set. I was tasked primarily with dressing the garden set, which is shown above.
I was also responsible for the grass and flowers in the top-down grass shots, which required some hand-adjusting after the 2D plate was finalized, as well as vine placement in the last image. I was not responsible for modeling or texturing any of the tree assets.