Houdini Process : “Glass Body” from Ben Watts

Ben Watts from BW Design was involved in creating a fantastic health TVC late last year, warning against the dangers of excess alcohol consumption. I asked him to give us some insights into his process, check out his Houdini awesomeness…

“I did all the growth sims in Houdini & created the attributes for Blackbird (the studio) to use at render time.”

“I used a variety of techniques to create the growth. I had shots for the throat, liver and bowel.”

“For the throat and bowel I used VEX to create a pretty standard algorithm that looks for neighboring points and draws a line to it if a certain condition is met. As the growth propagates you get a nice branching pattern across the surface mesh.”

“I used multiple start points and created attributes to add speed changes & variation to the various seed points. Once I had the base branching in place, I meshed the resulting polylines which gave a vein like appearance. Finally, I setup various attributes (curvature, thickness etc.) that could be passed onto Maya for rendering with Redshift.”

“For the liver simulation I used a similar technique to the throat and bowel, only it had to have bubbly look to it once the transition was complete. Once the fringe of the transition had started, I used RGB blending to gradually add in some instanced geo / displacement for the bubbles and modulated the motion with noise per bubble to create the undulation in the surface.”

Ben has previously created two VFX / Cinema 4D Tutorials – VFX Cinema 4D Training : Volume 1 – Ground Collapse and VFX Cinema 4D Training : Volume 2 – Killer Tornado which continue to be popular on helloluxx, however he switched to Houdini around Christmas of 2014. He cites his main reason for the switch, “… was because I really wanted to dive into technical effects and Houdini seemed to be software best suited to FX work. I was also very interested in learning how to code & build my own tools.”

Houdini Process : “Glass Body” from BW Design