As promised, here's the final short film from last year! Enjoy!
UPDATE MARCH 2021 - I linked the final short film from last semester so the balloon can be seen in action. It turned out great and shoutouts to all the students who really pushed the project home in the last few weeks, those were crazy times.
For my third year Animation class we were tasked with collaborating on a Short Film project. My project was "A Story Over Clouds", and I served as the primary surfacing artist. One of our group's modelers sculpted the hot air balloon asset, re-topologized it and unwrapped parts of it before passing it over to me for final unwrapping and UV packing in Blender.
As procedural materials are my main interest, I chose to make three to match our general idea for the balloon; rope, wicker and the actual balloon material. For the rope and balloon I mainly went off my intuition in Designer to get the shape I want, but I really struggled with the Wicker. I got the general idea for how the shapes should work from Peter Sekula's Wicker Material breakdown and worked on it from there to match the overall aesthetic of the short film, which was slightly stylized or cartoonish, which is why the materials focused more on broad strokes details versus nitty-gritty ones.
Check out Peter's breakdown of his own wicker material if you have time, it was super educational in putting together my own Wicker material -- It really is a great workflow; https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DObYE
And check out the balloon's modeler: https://www.artstation.com/olgadannik