Resources
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Elucidae
December 21, 2024
Elucidae is a personal project by CG Supervisor Christopher Herrick with the goal of designing a sophisticated character and exploring new artistic techniques and technologies using openUSD in Houdini's Solaris. Chris wanted to create something fascinating and beautiful that could really push the boundaries of communicating emotion through form and expression.
The RenderMan for Solaris project was curated and edited by Pixar's Leif Pedersen.
The Solaris project is a great way to get acquainted with RenderMan-centric workflows for openUSD, including mesh edits, geo settings, animations, materials, lights, and ideal render settings for using RenderMan's machine learning Denoiser.
Elucidae is designed to fit in memory for most modern GPUs, allowing artists to test the speed of XPU. If users want to render in high resolution and use more memory, they can take advantage of XPU's resource agnostic design and switch to XPU-CPU mode for greater availability of system memory.
Elucidae statistics panel
There are friendly ways for artists to interface with the project, including dropdowns for choosing animations and useful geometry settings, such as Micropolygon Length, for dialing in displacement detail.
A look-dev node exemplifies solaris-centric workflows for UX building and gives control over a grayscale wireframe material, which allows for the easy testing of geometric properties.
User friendly UIs offer artistic control
Layered skin, eye, and cloth materials showcase subsurface scattering, multi-lobe specular, and fuzz shaders with insightful RenderMan pattern networks which will help you understand Pixar recommended workflows for character look development.
Elucidae material network
Elucidae is a great opportunity for users to dissect a RenderMan centric project, designed to take advantage of the great openUSD workflows Solaris has to offer with RenderMan XPU. Have fun!
Christopher Herrick is a CG Supervisor and Artist known for work on Godzilla X Kong, Rings of Power Season 2 and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. He enjoys cooking, Japanese knife making, and powerlifting. His favorite beer is stout and his favorite movie is Alien.
This project is available with a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This allows you to share and redistribute for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the original author.
