Mercury is an abstract study of color and movement. I created it to explore shape of detailed vectors in a high velocity environment. in this piece there are over a million strands to inherit the turbulence of the space they exist in. Ultimately they contract to reveal one of the marly horses by Guillaume Coustou the Elder. A form that matches the wild and untamed colors that permeates this film.

I created this in houdini, using a volume trail sop to generate the splines. I then ran the splines through a wire solver was able to use a fire and smoke simulation to advect the movement of the splines, creating the turbulent air field that they represent. At first I only simulated a fraction of the splines intending to transfer their animation after that sim to the rest of the splines. However I determined that I was losing too much detail with that method, so I instead decided to run all one million splines through the wire solver to give each spline accurate and unique movment. I then rendered the result in redshift.