Charles Trippe is a student at SCAD. This piece was submitted as a project for Clarke Stallworth's Houdini class where he was required to model a mechanical device using Houdini and then animate it using only expressions.

As a result, a lot of thought had to go into how he could deconstruct the motion of the mechanism into a series of expressions that replicated the movement of each part and functioned correctly as a whole. In his project, Charles made extensive use of instancing, parenting and null transforms. There is not a single keyframe in the entire project; even the camera move is animated with an expression.

Charles also used this project as an opportunity to practice lighting and shading techniques in Houdini. The project was lit in Houdini and shaded with a combination of stock shaders and a few custom ones made through vops networks and some hand-coded in vex. The flexibility of mantra and the renderman-like shading language made it easy for him to transition his knowledge from RSL to VEX.

More of Charles' Work

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