Aranea

As two years of studies at Visual Magic Education came to an end, it was time for us to create our examination project.

Since we've recently had a thorough Houdini course all of us were already familiar with and set on doing it inside of Houdini. 

Having never done a colaborative project inside of Houdini while also only having six weeks to finish the entire project, USD proved to be a challange, but rather a fun one!

Now it's time to dig into some breakdowns!

Pipeline Optimization (made by Oscar Mehtälä)

Knowing that time was against us from day one, we figured that building different tools for tedious task would be a good idea.

We created tools for tasks such as; Asset Preping, Animation Setup/Export, Render setup and more...

Environment (made by Cordelia Svensson)

Working with the environment proved to be more of a challange than we at first thought. Properly understanding how both the instancer and layout node worked was quite the hassel, espacially the layout node since it has such high potential but some large drawbacks complicates its use cases.

Although in the end we managed the get a hold of the above mentioned nodes!

Rigging (made by Pontus Edén)

First things first and credit where credit is due, we bought this spider from VFX GRACE and although it already came with a rig, we had to redo it. This time inside of Houdini. (We also named the spider Lisa-Greta hence why it sometimes says LG_...)

Link from where we bough the spider: https://www.vfxgrace.com/product/spider-pholcus-animated-vfx-grace/

Crowds (made by Pontus Edén)

As the spiders were an important part of our story we spent a lot of time problemsolving and perfecting the scale, speed and movement of our crowd simulations so all shots would reach the same level of quality

Lisa Greta & Camera Animation (made by David Bülow)

Animating in Houdini was something new to us, no one having any real experience with it. Although it had it's challanges it also came with the added benefit of having access to other Houdini nodes.

When it comes to the camera animation we first set our sight on camera tracking. We attemped it a few times, but it came with a bunch of issues, issues we didn't have the time to solve. We instead went with the old fashioned way and fully hand animated it.

Spider Wave (made by Oscar Mehtälä)

Something we knew we wanted when we initally planed the story was some kind of USP, something that would make our project stand out from the crowd. That something came to be an Spider Wave, something that came with a lot of issues.

We started with doing a fairly simple flip sim and it almost worked... until we put the spiders on the points and they had no rotation. So we instead turned to flip sim into a velocity volume and used that as our velocity for a vellum simulation, since they also calculate rotations. 

Although it isn't perfect it works for the short amount of time it's shown on screen!

Lighting (made by Oscar Mehtälä)

When lighting our scene we made sure to try a bunch of different iterations, adding lights in the pit, adding lights through out the tunnel and so on. We also took the time to properly dive into the IES and how they can be a great asset to creating more interesting lighting.

Closing Remarks

This have been a six week project and all of us has learnt a lot throughout this project. This included learning a full new workflow, diving into crowds, rigging, procedural modelling and animation, all of it taking place inside of Houdini.

Thank you for looking through our project and considering our entry, all the best to you!