Procedural Buildings

This was the first time I tried procedural modelling in Houdini. I remade a bunch of Sydney landmarks and turned them into HDAs for easy control. Around this time I was making music on ShaderToy, maybe you can tell from the sine waves?

I rendered everything with Cycles in Blender, which was a challenge. I had to write scripts to fix Blender's instancing and remake a few Houdini setups using Geometry Nodes.

Everything is timed to the music, Assumptions by Sam Gellaitry. I didn't make the setups with animation in mind, so it was tricky to sync.

Project 1 Trailer

A sneak peak of an ongoing passion project I started in January. Not learning from past mistakes, I committed to Blender before hitting the roadblock of hair simulation. I had to bite the bullet and port everything to Houdini. I learnt Solaris, Karma and how to force After Effects to use color management.

I made everything in this trailer from scratch, except for the beautiful artwork in the middle drawn by Ben Poate. The animation was done with a Rokoko Motion Capture Suit, with cleanup in Blender using Animation Layers.

Procedural Shaders

While learning Katana, I was surprised how tedious Renderman shaders are for basic tasks like scaling a noise texture. Since Katana supports Open Shader Language, I wrote my own shaders to make life easier.

It was fun so I got carried away and wrote a raymarching engine in OSL. I used it to render all the fractals including the correct camera perspective.

My plan was to render everything in Karma. Sadly Karma doesn't support OSL scripts yet, so I rendered the fractals in Blender and reprojected them. Luckily Blender got GPU support for OSL so it was incredibly fast.

UTS Showreel

A compilation of my best work before 2022, including a technical breakdown. I made this to apply for the UTS Animal Logic Academy, and luckily they let me in!

Most of the 3D work was done in Blender. I learnt Geometry Nodes before touching Houdini, which is a rare experience nowadays.

I mainly used Edge Split and Vector Refract for the trippy warping effects. You can find the project files on my Blender page if you're interested.

Project Dynamo

Nathan Le wanted to try compositing a CGI robot onto live action plates, so we went to Cockatoo Island. He found the robot model on Sketchfab, then rigged and animated it.

I tried rebuilding the environment with Gaussian Splatting and NeRFs, but our dataset was too small so I did it manually based on point clouds from COLMAP. I also used Nuke's camera tracker for the first time.

I wanted to try a linear color workflow using Ian Hubert's LUT Maker, but we recorded in sRGB so it fell apart. Ruben Luzaic did a fantastic job matching the lighting manually.

From Memory

An abstract piece I made for an art competition based on an image of hands playing with string. I finished it without leaving After Effects, using Trapcode Tao to generate the geometry.

I used CC Light Burst for the god rays, to add visual interest and give an ethereal feeling. I also used my favourite discontinued plugin, Hall of Mirrors by Red Giant. I recreated this plugin on ShaderToy if you want to try it yourself.

Fake Caustics Tutorial

A Blender tutorial I made using a great technique by Evan Wallace. It fakes caustics using pure geometry and runs in realtime in Eevee. I might revisit this since I only got 1 level of refraction to work.

Cycles now has proper caustic rendering for general cases, though it's not as fast as this method. I put my project files on Gumroad, and surprisingly people bought them. There's more tutorials in the works, so make sure to subscribe for more!

Dynamic Machines Challenge

A short animation I made in Blender for Clint's Dynamic Machines Challenge. Though I didn't make the top 100, it was great fun and I learnt a lot. I only had a week to finish it due to my terrible planning.

The characters and assets are from Inside by Playdead. I wanted to make the blob creature roll around and smash through things like it does in game, but it turned into an Indiana Jones chase sequence.

I did the sound design in FL Studio using huge convolution reverb and glass smashes I recorded. For more info, check out the breakdown in my UTS Showreel.

Coffee Brake

The first film we finished at UTS Animal Logic Academy. I worked on the coffee and spill surfacing, the explosion and flapping ties.

To automate the ties, I baked out looping caches from Houdini and made a Blender addon to strip the vertex weights, apply the Mesh Sequence Cache and rebake the Alembic. Overall it saved 50 shots of work. I released a version of this script for other departments to use, which saved another 15 shots of work.

The incredible speed of this film made some effects challenging. With Gary's unmatched power, the coffee kept clipping through the cup. Thankfully I learnt a fantastic stabilisation technique explained on my Houdini page.

Alone

The final film we finished at UTS Animal Logic Academy. I worked on the plant watering, smoke sims and thrusters.

The watering was tricky since I couldn't get two way coupling to work. Ideally the plant and water would influence eachother, except the plant was Vellum and the fluid was POP.

I ended up transferring the POP velocity onto Vellum, then running another POP sim afterwards to get proper collisions with the leaves. I would've tried Vellum Fluid, but all the supervisors I talked to said it's much worse than FLIP.

Dave's First Day

A student film many of us worked on outside of class at UTS Animal Logic Academy. Judisak Meng did a fantastic job at directing, it turned out just as good as Coffee Brake.

I worked on many different effects including cloth, mopping, coffee spilling, boxes falling and the planet exploding. It was great fun using the RBD Guide feature to prevent the boxes falling onto the button.

Although the planet was hit from the front, it looked better to spread out sideways. Setting the velocity didn't look good, so I used a sphere collider instead.