The Coffee Girl of Montrose

The story of a guy who had never been a coffee drinker… until he met the girl of his drinks.

Is it single origin true love or just a highly caffeinated blend of high minded ideas from books and movies and art?

The only way to find out is to keep going back for more of both.

About the Project

It’s an ambitious short: I created all the assets and animations and did my best to organize it in the model of a major production pipeline.

USD Assets and Workflow

I came up with the story a while ago, but thought it was the perfect way to explore USD workflows in Houdini.

USD (Universal Scene Description) is an open source production standard developed by Pixar to streamline department and format interchange (https://openusd.org/release/index.html).

While it was developed for large scale projects, it’s perfect for smaller ones too – allowing smaller studios to create bigger projects.

I tried to leverage at many aspects as possible. The project was as much a learning exercise as a production.

• Variants for props and characters
  • Having multiple tree models with different amounts of leaves with different materials in order to quickly convey seasons
  • Switching out LODS based on camera distance to maximize memory usage
  • Multiple assemblies and environment layouts for each scenario, easily scalable per scene/shot
• USDskel for the character animations
  • Exporting fbx animations from Maya and being able to update the skeletons in existing character geometry within scenes at any point
• Opinions and Composition Arcs
  • Sharing and updating cameras, scene layouts, and lighting setups between scenes
  • Ongoing look development with each asset easily update-able, making priorities and troubleshooting much easier to manage

Software Integration

A big part of this was being able to combine different pieces of software to tell a single story, keeping the look and feel unified, and simplifying the complexity that comes along with multiple file formats.

Software used

• Houdini (for the effects, assembly and rendering)
• Maya (for the animation)
• Substance Painter (for the hand painted textures)

Animation Styles

Another idea that I wanted to play around with was a progression of animation styles.

• Begins with classical, 12 principles of animation stuff
• As he becomes more caffeinated, I shifted the animation from being on ones, to twos, to threes, to fours, then on twenty-fours
• As the his tolerance increases and the caffeine loses its power, the animation moves to motion capture and physics-based ragdoll.

Production Stills