Procedural Gears ll Houdini, Unreal
I completed this project as a freelance artist in collaboration with The Department. You can learn more about the project by watching this video:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp0J5QXuttG/
My task was to create an animation of gears that would be displayed on a large LED screen on a cruise ship. As the project was still in the development phase, we aimed to make the system as flexible as possible to allow for changes in the appearance of the mechanism during production.
To achieve this, I developed a setup in Houdini that worked as follows:
I created information points that were sequentially connected to each other. These points could be manually adjusted to provide complete creative freedom without worrying about animation complexity.
Next, the position of these points and the information they carried were processed to automatically generate additional values responsible for gear size, rotation, and number of teeth on each gear.
All this information was then combined and sent to the next asset where the geometry of each gear was created and animated.
Finally, the resulting geometry was exported as an animated FBX file and imported into Unreal where I made additional adjustments to lighting and materials.
Using the procedural gear generator I created, I managed to make gears of various shapes and general appearance.
At the top level, each gear is a point of information that connects to each other.
Further, the point data is connected and processed automatically generating new data, such as: the diameter of the connected gear, the number of its teeth, their size, and the speed of rotation.
To obtain new data I used the VOP.
To obtain new data I used the VOP.
Further, all information is connected together and fed into a new asset. Based on the received data, the system creates gears and animates their rotation inside this asset.
Asset node tree in which geometry is processed and gears are created.