Butterfly Queen
Queen Butterfly Pitchdeck.pdfRoles: Realtime Content Artist, VFX Artist, Lighting & Environment
3 People | 3 Months
The Butterfly Queen is a Virtual Production short film envisioned by Director Tingting Lyu. It focuses on the story of a girl who steps into a fantastical magic cave and encounters supernatural creatures of the fae realm.
My role on early in production was as the unity expert. I was responsible for setting up the lighting, environment and VFX within the Unity HDRP pipeline. I would also consult Lyu about the functionality of the Unity engine and HDRP to effectivly translate her ideas and script. Later on, i assisted with motion capture seesions, data cleanup, animation implementation and keyframe sequencing.
We had about 13 weeks to produce this at the Robert Zemeckis Center at the University of Southern California.
Our director utilized several premade assets for the environment and character models, I was busy constructing the environment using the rock and tree assets, manipulating lighting and post-processing effects to establish a mystical mood, and highlighting the pond as the point of focus. I built the butterflies from the ground up in Unity's VF Graph due to us needing the functionality to determine a path for the particles. They served as to act as the primary prop!
Butterfly VFX Graph
My director tasked me with making butterflies that she could control and use to make several shapes, particularly a staircase that would extend above the pond. I decided to construct the base effect in Unity VFX graph as I knew it could generate enough particles to create a good swarming volume of butterflies.
Functionality includes: Follow Bezier Path, Variable Path Adherence, Turbulence, Wing Flap Speed, Count, and bounding areas
Butterflies on Bezier Path
The butterfly particles follow a bezier path from an array of }Game Object Transformation points. The artist can control variables that determine density, and speed. If I returned to this project, I'd add some gizmos to visualize the Bezier path's position objects to outline the Butterflies' actual path.
Butterfly Flock
Allows random flocking of Butterflies within bounding dimensions or applied to a shape.
Glowbug VFX Graph
Glowbugs are like butterfly flocks but are simple particles. They create a nice mystical atmosphere in the cave. You can change the count, size, bounding area, turbulence, and color, and even choose between spawning or maintaining a constant count.
