Still Life

This composition was my first project in Houdini. I was challenged to combine my knowledge in lighting and rendering with my photography experience in order to create a still life render composed of free models and textures. With composition inspiration from phtographer Monika Grabkowska, I found as many assets as I could and created more specialized assets such as the bowl, leaves, and cloth myself. 
Using Houdini for the first time posed new challenges in a node-based workflow that I was not used to. Though I felt that my experience in Nuke helped me to grasp some of the more general ideas of node functions, software operation, and node paths, it was still unfamiliar territory. But with guidance from reference and professors, I was able to put together a node-based lighting setup that I was proud of and start off learning Houdini with a bang!