Baby Crib Motion Graphic
Motion Graphic:
This Baby Crib Assembly motion graphic was animated in Maya, the crib was textures in Substance Painter, all visual effects were done in Houdini, all simulations were done in Houdini, all shaders were made in Houdini, and the project was rendered in Houdini using VRay.
Modeling and Animation:
This Baby Crib model and textures had already been made and approved by the client. For the animation I wanted to make the crib assemble itself while maintaining a floaty feeling to the movement. This was mostly achieved with the movement from the main baseboards and the bars. Some components of the crib "sweeps" in from out of camera meanwhile other aspects seem to appear out of nowhere. This was achieved by keyframing the item scaling significantly in one or more direction.
Animation playblast from Maya
UV Island from Substance
Cloud Sim:
There were two cloud groups created in Houdini for this project. There were the clouds in the foreground that interact with the animated crib. And there are static clouds in the middleground created to bridge the gap between the foreground simulated cloud and the clouds from the HDRI. They were both made using the same node structure except that the static clouds don't have any input from collision geometry. When it came to duplicating the static clouds around the space I initially took a plane, applied a mountain node to it to give it vertical hills and valleys, used a scatter node to scatter points across this misshapen plane, and used a copy to points node to copy a cached static cloud to each point. This was to randomly place the clouds around the space using a procedural method. In the end I deleted that attempt and manually placed the clouds to create a better visual harmony between the foreground, middleground, and background.
Simulated cloud node tree from Houdini
Blanket Creation Sequence:
This Baby Crib Assembly motion graphic was animated in Maya, the crib was textures in Substance Painter, all visual effects were done in Houdini, all simulations were done in Houdini, all shaders were made in Houdini, and the project was rendered in Houdini using VRay.
Blanket Draping Sequence:
This Baby Crib Assembly motion graphic was animated in Maya, the crib was textures in Substance Painter, all visual effects were done in Houdini, all simulations were done in Houdini, all shaders were made in Houdini, and the project was rendered in Houdini using VRay.
Lighting:
I was able to utilize Light Links in Houdini to ensure that lights placed for one sequence won't impact another sequence. For instance I had lights I had lights set up for the clouds: a bright warm light above the cloud where it catches the light of the sun and then a slightly dimmer cold light underneath to best mimic the color variation in clouds. The light linking options within Houdini allowed these lights to not affect the blanket creation sequences and vice versa. I had to limit my usage of lighting linking however as I eventually noticed a bug occurring in the render process due to the broken connections of multiple lights and objects.
Rendering:
This Baby Crib Assembly motion graphic was animated in Maya, the crib was textures in Substance Painter, all visual effects were done in Houdini, all simulations were done in Houdini, all shaders were made in Houdini, and the project was rendered in Houdini using VRay.