Client: History Channel

Studio: Method

Role: FX Artist (line growth simulation)

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This project in particular really pushed me to new technical ability with Houdini as an fx artist. I was wasked with growing these lines with pixel precise timing so that as the camera rose through the scene the viewer would get to see the exact right moment of each part of the labyrinth growing. In houdini there are always many ways to go about achieving something but for this effect I couldn't use the typical method that I was used to that involved just revealing points of the line in succession. Because of how close the lines were to camera and in some cases the speed at which the lines where supposed to reveal, that method would have introduced stepping artifacts. And to aleviate that, we would have had to subdivide the lines to a point were they were simply too data heavy to deal with.

 

So I had to look into how to leverage prim intrinsic attributes on the lines in order to keep the lines as light weight as possible in terms of point count, and also actually move the endpoints of the lines through space effectively giving us true transform values.