Nausicaä - Art of Conrad Sly

Nausicaä

I began a project based learning excercise that is an homage to one of my favorite films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Win, by Hayao Miyazaki. I recently finished reading the detailed manga, which was so inspirational and motivating. The themes of environmentalism and cultural conflicts of this film and manga have always really intrigued me. Here I will explore gradual content development for re-creating some of my favorite shots and clips from the film and manga.

おわり- Beginning at the end.

For my first study, I wanted to start simple, so I began the project at the end of the film. The closing clip is a shot of Nausicaa's pilot's hat, that she lost during a crash, discovering the truth of the toxic forest. There are cavernouse chambers beneath the toxic forest, where the trees are undertaking purifying the earth. I created the hat and simulated the leather fabric in Marvelous Designer, and rendered the simple shot in VRay.

Sanctuary Test Shot

I decided I wanted to move to real-time computer graphics, for the forseable future, as the speed of iteration and film making potential is too enticing to give up. I chose to work with Unreal Engine, as they recently acquired Quixel and their amazing library of photogrammetry assets, which suite my needs tremendously well and will speed up the contributions to this project.

For this shot, I was exploring using Houdini to create and render out a flowmap to be used in Unreal, to simulate the flow of water in this botanical sanctuary. While the results are rough, the workflow for creating the flow map was really fun and promising. I will refine it for the final scene. More information about this process can be found on my blog here.

The Secret Garden

It's been a struggle of mental health during this strange time of global pandemic. One of the scenes in Nausicaa that always stuck with me was the scene with secret garden. There in her sanctuary she was able to reflect and find solace, discovering the secrets of the toxic planet she inhabited. I found it a good time to continue my exploration of recreating some scenes from the film in Unreal, and indeed the process brought me some much needed tranquility.

I learned quite a few new things making this. How to grade to get a more painterly look and feel, and how to create flow maps in Houdini for real time fluid simulation. I'm not quite finished with it, but I'll step away from it for a while. The next thing I wanted to try is creating vertex animation textures and/or alembic cached water simulations to see how they compare to this real-time water simulation.