Mentor Comments
Beck:
-Good job keeping effects contained
-Pay attention to refraction on bubbles and the physics of it
-Be careful for scale- vellum can also be used for small scale fluid sim
-Maybe go macro in the flower scene as well since the other shots are also macro
Billy:
-Good shots with intention
Kyle:
-Flower scene– keep the environment simple, don’t make it overly detail
-Find elegant ways to transition into each shot
-Lay out color palette together and make sure they follow a color script and are
cohesive
Stephan:
-Macro photography with shallow DOF
Molly:
-Figure out timing of the camera moves and make sure the speed of all the shots
make sense
Pheya:
-Find similarities in the shots and see what connects them together to help with
transitions
(droplet falls from flower transition to water scene for ex.)
To Do
Team:
-Complete CG pre-visualization of our advertisement
-Reorder shots where necessary to make the hard cuts make sense
-Figure out camera movements that lead into the next shot in a smooth manner
-Layout color palette that makes the entire ad feel coherent
Me:
-Complete pre-visualization for shots 2 and 5
-When creating bubble sims, make sure everything is procedural so it will be easy to make changes later
-Start working on the FLIP sim as soon as possible so there is plenty of time to make changes
-If time, perform a test render on shot 2
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1/18/2026
Today it was my goal to start the FLIP Sim that would be used for shot 2 when the ring enters the water. Before diving into that, I looked at reference of small objects falling into water
Using FLIP's narrow banding settings, this was the rough test sim I cached(All to real world scale)
FLIP Sim Test
With that finished, I was able to complete the pre-vis for shot 2 and send it to Wren
Sh02 Pre-vis
Sh02 Pre-vis Side View
With shot 2 pre-vis done I finally was able to move on to creating a cleaner version of shot 5's exploded view animation. Once again I did research on exploded view's done in other advertisements
This was what I ended up with after my research. The camera pan at the end is for the Title transition that Wren will be adding in post
Sh05 Pre-vis
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1/16/2026
The more I looked into different bubble references, the more I realized that what I had currently was not a very good depiction of an object being dropped underwater.
The main issue with my past iterations is that the bubbles were not only much too large, but the range of different bubble sizes were not vast enough. To fix that, I created 3 different POP simulations to get 3 different sizes of bubbles. This way I could control their individual behavior better, as well as get a more convincing result
Large Bubbles
Medium Bubbles
Small Bubbles
New Bubbles
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1/14/2026
Today I really wanted to focus on getting more accurate bubble behavior down. I did research looking at bubble behavior(specifically at smaller scale) and what I noticed is that bubbles naturally drift towards each other, similar to bird flocking
So with this discovery I began using Houdini's "Flock" node in the DOP level to get a ton of iterations in order to replicate this behavior
Flipbook
Flock Node Settings
As bubbles grow while rising, I wanted to implement that into my simulation. Not only would it give me a more realistic result, but it would help hide the bubbles that are emitting from the ring. To do this my solution was to simply multiply the age attribute from my bubble sim by the pscale attribute. I used a ramp parameter so I could fully control the speed at which the bubbles grew when they spawn
VOP Network
Before Age Scale
After Age Scale
While the difference doesn't look that absurd, this small addition helps the bubbles look less like they are spawning out of nowhere
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1/13/2026
Today we presented our product pitch to the NYC mentors. Despite obviously being a little nervous, it went extremely well! The mentors provided some fantastic critic which my team and I will be implementing in these coming weeks
Product Pitch, edited by Wren Pellant