Method | AICP Reel

The Idea

The Motion Capture Shoot

Armed with some test footage, Method then embarked on a motion capture shoot at House of Moves in Los Angeles. They sent male and female 3D models beforehand to allow for a real-­time display during the capture process. 

At House of Moves, two­-to-­three minute bursts of dancing in various styles were captured at a time, making up a total of about 50 takes. The next step would be to apply procedural animation and effects to the mocap data. Method received .fbx files from House of Moves that contained character geometry fully skinned with a t-­pose and moving with the motion capture data. These were then converted to an Alembic file and occasional processing through CHOPs was required when the actual blend from t-pose became necessary.

From Data to Dancing

Then came the process of distinguishing dancers ­ there are 45 characters ­ with a flourish of effects; all the while Method aimed at keeping the characters “dynamic and tactile,” notes Houdini FX Artist Tomas Slancik. Here’s how some of the main effects were achieved, as Slancik outlines:

Feathers, Scales and Leaves -­ these all used a similar setup utilizing an in­-house Houdini-based feather system, with slight customizations. They started with painting actual "feathers" on the t-pose geometry, then snapped these onto the dancing character. We then applied feather dynamics, which was either a simple custom spring based solver with post bend deformation, or in the case of leaves a wire sim. For the blue feathered character we created additional cloth sims for the falling feathers.

Fur ­- we used the standard Houdini fur tools on these characters, and applied some minor customization. The tools were artist friendly, and even allowed non Houdini users to create a variety of fur styles very easily. Pretty much all of them used post sim length constraints to fix the stretching that occurred on the curves. We were impressed with the speed and versatility of Houdini fur, especially Mantra’s ability to render millions of fur strands in very little time.

Beadstrings, Clothstrips – starting off from the balloon lady setup, we did a spinoff using grain solvers for these.They worked pretty well, then a bit of temporal smoothing was applied through CHOPs to remove occasional jitter. The grain solver was another of those useful solvers used across the board, obviously on sand simulations but also to add variety by scattering small beads on the floor.

Marshmallow Man -­ another of the experiments that worked really well. The outer shell was created using VDB volumes from the body geometry, then turned into tetrahedrons for the FEM sim. The innermost tetrahedrons were constrained to the dancer which was driving motion, but still kept the outside squishy and soft.

Stringy Forms ­- this is created using a combination of procedural curve generation setups, mostly using VEX. The movement was achieved either through advecting by volume velocity fields or using a wire solver on top,depending on which ones you refer to. But I'd say Houdini's wire solver was the most used solver for this piece, it's really flexible and fast.

Light ­- there are several dark scenes lit by emission shaders using Mantra PBR. For some it was necessary to use geometry lights instead for reducing the noise, while others worked just fine with light emitting shaders.

Other characters -­ there were a few non­-Houdini animations that got included. The long cloth ribbons character were simulated in Maya’s ncloth, then rendered in Mantra while the neon rasta man was all made in Cinema 4D.

The go-­to Solutions in Houdini

On top of the solvers Slancik mentions above, he says “the most common phrase” in the Method office was ‘Just Point Deform it’, meaning the Point Deform SOP formed a large part of making the shots possible. “It allowed us to develop any effect on the t­-pose then easily deform with motion captured geometry. That was used for either the final effect or individual parts, like for 'constraining' fixed points of balloons, bead strings, cloth strips, marshmallow, to animation before running a sim on it.”

Another often used attribute of Houdini for the reel was VDB volumes, which Method employed for geometry processing and collision geometry. Slancik says that much VEX code was written, too, usually in the form of wrangle nodes. “Also,” he notes, 

Major Effects On The Screen, On Time

With 45 different characters to create, this reel could have been a time ­consuming project. But Method delivered it in two months with a core team of just three people, and another three working on it part­-time. Slancik attributes some of that speed to the flexibility of Houdini. “We needed a procedural setup that would allow for improvisation and customization. It would start as an idea in the morning, like 'let's do a balloon lady’ and by the evening we had a version ready for render.”

Credits

Client: AICP/RSA
Project: 2016 AICP Sponsor Reel
Concept, Design & Direction: Method Design
Director: Rupert Burton
Creative Director: Jon Noorlander
Art Director: Johnny Likens
Production: Method Studios NY
Producer: Adrienne Mitchell
VFX: Method Studios
Houdini FX Artist: Tomas Slancik
Houdini FX Artist: Vraja Parra
Rigger: Ohad Bracha
Motion Capture: House of Moves
Motion Capture Supervision: Rupert Burton, Shane Griffin
Music: Major Lazer ­ Light It Up (Remix)