RenaiDance (2020)
Animated short film
Synopsis
“RenaiDance” is a 3D narrative animation. The theme is about cultural heritage and the integration of dreams, courage, and culture as transformation. By interpreting “inheritance” through the Chinese-artistic style and the emotional story, this film is about strong family love and elder culture in a never-ending chain.
Character Modeling
and Look Development
In RenaiDance, the character Bella appears in both a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old version. The most challenging part of the project was creating fabrics with fuzz, feathers, and fur that interact naturally with the underlying skin geometry. I used XGen for hair distribution and integrated Ornatrix to accelerate the guideline placement process. The costume simulation was completed in Marvelous Designer.
Embroidery Texture R&D
Creating photo-realistic embroidery patterns in 3D has always been a big challenge. Due to the massive application of embroidery textures on the cloth, fabrics. and props in our short film, we created a special procedure pipeline in Substance Designer, which allows texture artists to generate PBR embroidery textures simply based on an image provided by the concept artist.
Character Effects
To bring more life and realism to the character’s motion, I applied both cloth and hair simulations across most shots. The process began with cleaning up overlapping geometries, followed by nHair and nCloth simulations to capture accurate collisions, folds, and subtle wrinkles.
Effects
In RenaiDance, I designed a series of magical particle effects to visualize the most emotional and heartfelt moments of the story—bringing the narrative to its climax and deepening its dreamlike atmosphere. All effects were created in HoudiniFX, cached as Arnold Archives, and then imported into Maya for lighting and final rendering.
Lighting & Compositing
Lighting is where the imagery truly comes alive. It shapes characters and objects, adds beauty and depth, and conveys emotion through carefully balanced color and value.
All lighting was done in Maya and Arnold, with final compositing in Nuke.
Shot Breakdown
Credit
Pipeline Tool
I built a lightweight Python-based pipeline tool to optimize file navigation and folder structure management. The tool enables artists to automatically create standardized directory hierarchies and access specific files within complex paths in seconds.
