Appealing Animation

by Jonathan Bourim and Christophe Bouchard

A cross-disciplinary, collaborative effort between myself as a programmer and a fantastic artist by the name of Christophe Bouchard. This project was first modeled and animated in Maya, then exported into SideFX Houdini for procedural animation of the peeling and associated materials.

Procedural Animator & Technical Artist

Jan 2020 - May 2020

Featured in the 2020 Houdini Student Reel! (2:38)

Responsibilities:

• Worked closely with Christophe to coordinate an art pipeline where we were able to merge our resulting work seamlessly between Maya and Houdini. We closely collaborated and iterated on project elements including rendering, lighting, material systems and animation implementation.

• Learned extensively about mesh manipulation in Houdini, and how to transform the objects in the animation. The use of Houdini’s native Vellum system is what simulates the objects’ cloth-like behavior when peeling.

• Utilized the VEX language to perform mesh transformations throughout the simulation, a C-style language created for Houdini. Such transformations include a helix generator, which would generate the shape that would cut into the objects’ mesh, creating a spiral-looking peel effect.

• Researched UV unwrapping and Houdini texture in order to manipulate the material system (VOP networks) to achieve a double-sided texture for both objects, making the inside of each object appear different from the outside.