Walking Teapot by Dylan Sisson. Models by 2018 Pixar PUPs and Leif Pedersen © Disney/Pixar - RenderMan "Lost Things" Art Challenge

ARTISTIC

Story

My story takes place in a magical world and more precisely in a witch's cottage. The witch lives in nature, in a very calm place but unfortunately she is not the only inhabitant of her cottage. Since many years, rats take more and more place in the house's structure. Rats steal food and objects and the witch tries to get rid of them.
She tried first with mouse traps but she never succeeded. Rats continued day after day to steal food and personal object that are important to her. This situation was so frustrating for the witch that she decided to create a potion of poison.
One day, when she opened the entrance door, she was so angry to see rats in action that she casted a spell to electrify all the rats that ran away on the metal chain. Other rats on top of the beams succeed to steal loots and will probably try to steal again the next day.

Idea

My main idea for this story was to get the point of view of the rat on the top of a beam who watches all the actions from a far in a safe place.

Composition and Layout

To get a good understanding of my story I tried to get a good composition and I used the frame within a frame to split actions and characters group :

• The entrance door --> The Witch
• Between beams --> Rats run away and secondary actions
• The rest of the image --> Rats safe place and stealing loots

Composition Guides :

At the beginning of the layout I planned to put a sleeping cat on the sofa (on the third bottom left), the angry witch (on the third top left) and a rope with climbing rats on it (on the right third).
Because of the little amount of time, I decided to remove the cat and to get a more credible staging, I replaced the rope with the cauldron metal chain.

Set Design

Cinematography

I used a 18mm focal length and I did a split diopter shoot to get the feeling of being with the foreground rat because I want the spectator to be part of the rats thieves group.

I used a 18mm to increase the distance between the foreground rat and the witch. That gives the feeling to be in the safe place far from the danger. The 18mm also increase the roundness of the cottage with its distortion.

TECHNICAL

Modeling and Assets

Background Environment

For the background I used Poly Haven textures mix together with vertex paint and map with HexTileManifold node. For the scattering I used Poly Haven grass asset with vertex paint map and Geometry nodes.

Progression time-lapse

Scripts

I work with many CC0 assets, mostly from Poly Haven and I worked on there Renderman conversion one by one.

I first copy assets files into my assets folder and I converted assets to Renderman.
I used relative texture path and when I import the asset done in the main scene I had to copy all my asset texture's file into the main textures folder for the assembly scene.

To avoid any mistake and to speed up the process, I created a little script who copy all my assets texture's files to the main texture folder.

Easter eggs