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Snowdrop Lights

The goal of this piece was to give a fantastical element to a plant and create something new. For my fantastical plant, I wanted to combine a snowdrop plant with a lightbulb. I initially thought of combining these two objects together when I discovered the snowdrop flower. I immediately thought of its stem resembling a lightbulb socket. Then I came up with the idea of replacing the pollen center of the plant with a filament of a lightbulb. I would then have the textures on the petal's transition from petal to glass as the camera moves to reveal the other nature of the plant. Here is the final render of my work and well as a breakdown of my process. I also kept a blog of my day to day process while creating this with a more in-depth breakdown of my process below is the link.

LINK

Look Dev Rigs:

Below are the two look development rigs that showcase the petal and glass stages of the snowdrop flower in the animation.

Shaders:

I used three main shaders in this piece: a glass petal shader, a regular petal shader, and a leaf shader. Below are the texture maps I used for those shaders.

Glass Petal:

For the glass petal shader I worked from using specular, transmission, and a normal map for the bump to obtain the look of a glass petal.

Shader Setup:

Texture Maps:

Normal Map

Regular Petal:

For the normal petal shader I worked from using subsurface, some transmission for opaticy in the petal, specular, and a normal map for the bump

Shader Setup:

Texture Maps:

Leaf:

SSS Map/Normal Map

For the leaf shader I worked from using subsurface, some transmission for opaticy in the leaves, a map for specular roughness, and a normal map for the bump

Shader Setup:

Texture Maps:

SSS/ Normal/ Roughness

Compositing Breakdown

In order to achieve faster render times, I separated the scene from the background, mid-ground, and foreground. I applied lower resolution textures to the objects in the background and mid-ground. I applied the highest resolution textures to the hero flowers. Below you can see the stages in which I rendered the scene. The breakdowns also show how I applied DOP with a bokeh effect using z-defocus in Nuke. I then applied a final color correction in Nuke.

Reference:

Below is the reference board I made for expressing what I wanted to achieve out of this scene.

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