Penny Trevlopoulou - CFX and Look Development

I am excited to present my most favourite projects I worked on, while on my 4th and last year at the University of the West of Scotland. It's a combination of school and personal projects, all done in Houdini.

Fulla : A CFX and Look Development Project

Fulla is a concept character by Alexandra Jury. My goal for this project was to succesfully develop her clothes and accessories for a 3D Animation and demonstrate my skills in CFX with a multi-layered cloth and fur simulation.

The artist went into great detail researching Vikings style clothes for her project and that gave me a solid base to start working on the materials that would be later used.

It was important to me to do this research before creating any of the 3D models. I have a fashion design degree and have been making clothes for a few years now, which means that I have a good understanding on how different fabrics drape on the body and how they behave during movement. Knowing the materials I would use in advance were a key to the success of the simulations and the material making.

This project was a great opportunity to get to experiment with different techniques in Houdini. I got to learn how to perform efficient cloth simulations, while making use of alembic cache files, setting up multiple layers of cloths with different thicknesses and using masks and attributes to further control the simulation.

Draping the clothes in Houdini was a super-satisfying process and so was the procedural modelling of the accessories (belt, headpiece, necklaces). I learned how to use the vellum nodes to perform a hard-surface simulation and how to attach the accessories to the already animated character.

Finally, I had the opportunity to learn how to groom and simulate hair, for the fur on the cape.

To render my project, I learned how to make use of Solaris, how to save and load USD's and render with KarmaXPU and MaterialX.

Overall, I am super satisfied not just with the result but with the learning experience I had while I was working on my Honours project, especially considering that by the time it was finished, I had been working in Houdini for a little less than a year.

Butterfly Embroidery

This is a university project where I experimented with creating an embroidery effect using Houdini.

The technique I used was based on a tutorial by Entagma where they used a jpeg image to drive the desing of the embroidery. 

The butterfly design was created in Procreate.

My favourite part of this project was figuring out how to render the embroidery so it would look like threads. I used Solaris and Karma and decided to render the curves with a hair shader, which worked well.

I can see a lot of ways in which I could make the embroidery even more realistic (extruding geometry from the curves, adding loose hair using grooming techniques, or adding an animation to the threads) but this was a great opportunity to learn the basic technique.

Knitted Sweater

A personal project to learn how to create a knit model using Houdini

This technique is based on a tutorial by Fabricio Chamon, where he created a knit with the use of curves that he then projected on a sleeve's UVs.

I wanted to further experiment with this technique by projecting the knit onto a simulated sweater and using the UVs to control the size of the knit and the direction so it looks more realistic.

It was rendered in Solaris with Karma.

Dancing Dress

A personal project where I wanted to drape and simulate a dress on a dancing animation.

This was one of my first projects in Houdini when I was still learning the basics about draping and simulating clothes and my first attempt to ever use Solaris.

I love how the movement of the dress turned out and it is great to see how far along I have come from this, to my far more complicated Honours project, in such a short amount of time.