Live Show Visuals

Massive Visuals, Built to Evolve

Live shows on screens like Sphere in Las Vegas need every visual to work in a distorted spherical format, at enormous scale, while the creative direction keeps shifting. With Houdini, artists build effects on flat ground, refine simulations after the fact and wrap everything onto the screen at the end, so the look keeps evolving without starting over.

• Refine a simulation after it’s done, adjusting timing, shape and detail without re-simulating, so late creative notes don’t cost a day of compute. 
• Get more out of every simulation by reusing it with variation, filling a massive screen without the motion looking repeated. 
• Build complex organic systems from simple procedural rules, with secondary motion layered on that stays easy to control. 
• Design on a flat grid and adapt to the screen at the end, so one setup works for a sphere, a dome or a standard frame.
  

“Even though visually it looks quite complex, under the hood it’s actually very simple.” 
Artur Gadzhiev, CG Lead, Anyma

Gaussian Splats

Captured Performers, Endless New Shots

Music videos keep changing as new ideas arrive, but a captured performance can’t be reshot every time the director has another one. With Houdini, a small team treated animated Gaussian splats like any other procedural data, placing, instancing, rigging and simulating them to build new shots without going back to set.

• Bring volumetrically captured splat sequences into Houdini and stage them in polygonal sets, with lightweight proxy geometry for real-time previs. 
• Rig captured performers by applying motion capture to proxy geometry and transferring it back, creating new actions without another shoot. 
• Fill a rooftop with 500 time-offset crowd splats using Copy to Points, or hang a performer from a moving helicopter with a Vellum rope. 
• Break apart splats with MPM and add FLIP blood, giving the video’s final shot a full simulation.
  

Media Art & Drone Shows 

Build the Tools
Every Artist Needs

Most drone shows are big, static shapes in the sky, because hundreds of drones moving fast in close formation leave little room for creative risk. With Houdini, artists design the visuals and simulate the flight in the same software, so a show can move in natural, living forms and still be safe to fly.

• Shape the visuals and simulate drone spacing in one software, catching collisions yourself before the show goes to the manufacturer’s verification. 
• Go beyond static shapes, with point simulations that let hundreds of drones flow in organic forms that are still flyable. 
• Keep long shows flexible by defining shapes, drone counts and timing procedurally, so changes are quick and adjustments can be made right up to launch. 
• Fit into any collaborator’s pipeline: cache simulations for other renderers, export CSV for code-based artists, or build models for real-time exhibitions.
  

“Using Houdini, you can do both the visual, the beautiful part, and also the technical hard part in one software.”
Jan Paul Dubbelman, Independent Artist