Learning Houdini: Part 1
Learning Houdini: Part 1
Learning Houdini is like learning to swim, and this first project made sure we didn't drown.
Challenge
The Process
Texturing
The first step with the car model was getting the textures ready.
I customized my license plate for fun to say BOSTON.
Rigging/ Car Simulation
Even with heavy constraints, this was where we got to express ourselves through movement and composition. The simulation had to be run for about 100 frames to get up to speed before slowing down.
Mud Simulation
We brought the car simulation into a mud sim to use the car's movement to calculate mud, pebbles, water, and debris getting kicked up and landing. Using the provided mud simulation really solidified Houdini's capabilities to me, but also scared me a little bit. I was a lot to wrap my head around how intricate and how carefully Houdini had to be used in order to get the desired result.
Environmental Elements
We were provided trees and taught how to use a scatter to set up a randomized yet curated forest layout.
Final
Recap
This project helped us test the waters of Houdini. The point of this was experience, not expression, and helped us warm up to this software.
Learning Houdini: Part 2
Learning Houdini: Part 2
Reach for the Stars
Reach for a Coke
This project was for a collaboration between Coca Cola and KitBash3D. Using Coke's iconography and KitBash's Mission to Minerva kit, we had to make a short ad.
Now that we were swimming on our own, it was time to hit open water.
Challenge
The Process
Asset Set-Up
We customized the assets in Karma to get the textures realistic
Ocean of Coke
These assets gave me idea for my ad to show a water world: A planet covered in liquid where Coca Cola is harvested from the deep like oil rigs on Earth.
Animation Pipeline
Many on the animations could be done in cinema and brought into Houdini using a custom tool. That tool, however did not work for my animations. It simply stopped working if there was more than one pose morph, and I needed two to bring the wires back in. After literal days of tweaking settings, the only way I could get all the elements I wanted was to export a bunch of elements independently. The crane, coke bottle, crane wires, and retracting part of the crane are all separate animations.
Procedural Assets
Despite the surplus of provided assets, I felt that I still needed to realize my world more. I created custom ice cubes and glaciers to make the ocean seem colder, reflecting Coca Cola's common imagery. I generated snow on top of the glaciers to make it more realistic. I generated a bunch of clouds to populate the endless sky, and animated bubbles in Cinema 4D for the first 2 shots which I brought in to Houdini and textured.
Ice and Glaciers
I made custom ice masses and glaciers using Cinema 4D's sculpting. I textured them in Karma, and was able to set up perimeters to change the color and material of the ice based on its height.
Custom Bubbles
Clouds
Many of these didn't end up in the final piece, but it was good practice
Made a cloud sim in Houdini, then grabbed individual VDBs from different times to use as clouds for the final shot.
Final
Recap
This project kicked my ass.
Vibe Coding
Force Field
I was making an animation where a character was getting hit with an anime style liquid blast, but had a force field. While I was animating, I wanted to be able to change the size of the force field without going back into the sop network. This was a vibe coding opportunity to test how well AI could assist Houdini's work pipeline.
Claude turned out to be unsuccessful at getting anything working for this. I wasn't really getting anywhere with it, so I tried different things with Houdini to test other ends of AI's capabilities. I wanted to try to make a tool that could change the given attribute of an object based on an audio file.
That didn't really work out either.
Vibe coding isn't for me