Butterfly Queen (2023)
Role: Technical Artist - VFX, Environment, Motion Capture
Summary:
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 advise Lyu on the capabilities of Unity and its HDRP pipeline to effectively execute on her ideas. Later on, i assisted with motion capture sessions, data cleanup, animation transfers and key-frame sequencing.
I built the butterflies from the ground up in Unity's VFX Graph to resolve our need to determine a path for the particles. They served as to act as the primary prop!
I constructed 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.
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
The butterfly particles follow a bezier path from an array of 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.
Flocking spawns Butterflies within bounding dimensions or applied to a shape. You can change the count, size, bounding area, turbulence, and color, and even choose between spawning or maintaining a constant count.