Procedural Animation
Assignment: Use Houdini to procedurally create a kinetic artpiece
WIPs and Process
I began with brainstorming an idea that I feel like I'd be able to complete. I decided to go with a seagull pecking at a box of fries, which would have moving pieces.
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Designing this from scratch meant that I would have to also design all of the internal mechanisms, which proved to be somewhat of a challenge.
Once I got the design figured out, I started modeling everything in Houdini.
​Next I applied the rotation to the gears that needed it, going based off of the frame number * 2 in order for it to make a full circle in 180 frames so it could all loop. I changed the 2 between negative and positive depending on which way the gear needed to rotate. Then I did the plungers and their bounding box based vertical motion.
For the seagull’s rotation I applied both a rotation along the z axis and a translation along the x axis so that it would look properly rooted in its pivot, rather than the pivot moving as it rotates.
For the fry moving back and forth, I used a mechanism to transfer the rotary movement of the gears into a horizontal movement.
Final Video
Final Thoughts
While I didn't run into any major issues, it was certainly a challenge to design and then construct this from scratch completely. Since I designed it, I had to figure out how everything would move, and I had to make sure that there would be no collisions or clipping. Overall, I am rather proud of this project given that I had total control of it from the very beginning, right to the end.