Year: 2020
Software: Maya/Houdini
Had a lot of fun doing rigging, character animation (humanoids) and fx (corona particles) for this music video. The rigs are classic 3d character stuff projected onto a 2d skeleton used to drive skinning (to get flowing outlines). The geometry consists mostly of low res planes to keep skinning simple, rendered solely with Maya Hardware. Since we only had 3 weeks being able to render in real-time on a single machine was a great bonus. To get the timing right we decided to link the fps of animations to the bpm of the soundtrack. In this case, by animating in 21.5 fps every 10 frames would be a beat. That way I didnt have to use any audioclips in Maya – I could structure the animation in beats and make it loopable easily.
The same applied to the 2d particle solver, which I quickly put together in Houdini. The forces were written in vex to apply directed 2d shockwaves every beat, with additional handling for popping the particles once they accumulated too much force. I also built an sdf attractor for the shots with particles contracting in a shape, to the beat. Collisions were really shottily handled by a point relax but it was good enough, I just blasted the worst offenders. Working with geometry outlines in Houdini was pretty straightforward and fun, the popping / transition effects were just cache switches driven by an attribute output by the solver.
