Strive - CGI Short Film

Houdini was used across the entire pipeline: scene prototyping; character, vehicle, and environment modeling (with the Modeler for Houdini and Simple Tree Tools plugins); motorcycle rigging and animation in KineFX and APEX; scene layout in Solaris with USD; texturing in MaterialX, Copernicus, and the COPstance plugin nodes; character cloth simulation with Vellum; explosions and fire with Pyro Solver; shockwave response with the RBD Solver; puddles and splashes with FLIP Solver; and secondary waves with Ripple Solver.

In the intro, the RBD Solver handled destruction and the Axiom Solver handled smoke.

All assets use MaterialX shaders. Auxiliary AOVs were rendered in Karma CPU using a second license on our local server, while beauty passes were rendered with Karma XPU via Husk and USD caches on the GridMarkets render farm.

For procedural models and textures, we relied heavily on PDG and custom HDAs for automation. We also used the Karma Room Shader for interiors of background buildings and the ODTools plugin to import Megascans and third-party FBX assets, with automatic conversion of shaders to MaterialX.

The film’s core message is that justice rather than vigilantism keeps guilt and punishment in check, whereas acting as a vigilante only brings more chaos and harm to others. Sometimes that can be counterintuitive, since justice rarely arrives instantly, and the long-term consequences of taking the law into your own hands are anything but clear.

We built an interactive website where you can learn more about the project and how it was made. The “Learn detail" pages include screenshots from Houdini.

Project's Website: https://strive.faitel.tech/