Mardini 2025 – Completion Recap
Iron Heart Qualifier

What a month. I'm grateful to have had the chance to swim in the same creative waters as so many brilliant minds -- this challenge was a joyful gauntlet of curiosity, discipline, and procedural jazz. From toy ducks to seahorses, chrome arthropods skittering across tiled slither pads, to quantum-radio disco dancers emerging from some elsewhen... from molten memory mud and honey flowing from faraway lands to plastic puffy stickers -- each prompt offered a story, and I did my best to listen. Sometimes that worked out. Sometimes it didn’t. Here’s a look back.

This is the contact sheet for my Mardini Iron Heart journey: thirty-one entries, each a signal, each a step toward better craft. I’m thankful for all the inspiration and camaraderie. Here’s hoping we do it again sometime.

With respect and love,
–alan / @OrganicComputer

Mardini 2025 – Day 24: CRASH (Late Entry)

Sometimes collapse is a celebration. The tower had it coming ... rigid, overbuilt, a holdout from some prior geometry regime.

Enter our skittering kinetic-launcher friend: part missile platform, part creature of intent, IK-posed and KineFX puppeted into purpose. When the moment ripened, the launcher bloomed ... unpacking from its captured geo to fire a volley, each missile guided by POP logic and a well-timed attraction force. At impact, the structure didn’t just break, it transformed -- ignited by inherited velocity and crowned in a pyro aerial burst demo like digital confetti from the grid.

This was always meant to be a liberation.

see you soon,
–alan/organic

Mardini 2025 – Day 17: DANCE (Late Entry for Iron Heart consideration)

A bit of a backfill boogie... better late than never when you’re bringing the groove. This one's built on SOPs, animated with KineFX skeleton blends, and guided by a quantum radio whisper that said: “let them dance.”
Each pose along the curve is a signal, every chrome body a receiver—tuned to joy, streaming live from the procedural beyond, and frozen mid-beat by the strobe of a multiversal photographer.

see you soon,
–alan/organic

A super special THANK YOU to EVERYONE who participated in Mardini 2025 — your work inspired me daily.

Together, we forged ahead, vectoring into a solid spring season and setting the stage for a bright summer to come. That’s my hope for you — and for me too.

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Mardini 2025 – Day 31: LOPS – Underwater
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The pipes must flow.

Above the surface: a hushed breeze stirs the air. Below it: motion, light, something waking up in the depths. What once spilled, melted, and scattered now collects — refracted in clear, deep blue and lined with pulse-beam-tipped tendrils. The terraformation continues...

Ready for the next cycle.

See you soon!
–alan/organic

Mardini 2025 – Day 14: Graffiti (Late Entry)

Didn’t have time to tag this one live, but I circled back with something puffier to complete the task and claim the growth XP. These glossy, sticker-like decals bubble up across the surface like ant bites — warped and stretched as they follow the surface below.

Better late than not at all. This is one of those times.

Thank you for the inspiration along the way, each day ... even the ones we missed.

see you soon,
–alan/organic

Mardini 2025 – Day 30: LOPS – Moonlight

Midnight finds the transport pipes dormant, but not silent. They glisten like surgical tubing draped across an alien valley. Patient, and humming with latent purpose beneath the moon’s sterile spotlight. Steam towers rise slowly into the cold, thin air like coded smoke signals -- calling out to those who can see them, those who can read their intent — a quiet prelude to whatever comes next.

See you soon,
–alan / organic

Mardini 2025 – Day 29: LOPS – Sunset

Veins of organic chrome piping stretch like arteries through an exhausted, frozen landscape, catching the last light as the sun exhales behind a rim of fractured crater-rim peaks. No particles, no pyro, no FLIP ... just the last drops of warm golden light splashing across lonely shapes, waiting.

The kind of stillness that feels inviting. A spaciousness, if you will.

See you soon,
–alan/organic

Mardini 2025 – Day 28 – Mud

Slow pour. No rush.

This one’s all about thickness and tension, honey mud -- warm and easing its way out across the terrain with a life of its own.

I leaned into the sculptural shapes, letting the flow stretch and lift like pulled caramel before gravity reclaims it. No chaos here, just a quiet, sticky moment in the middle of a long, muddy exhale. Or something

see you soon,
-alan/organic

MPM Solver setup leveraging the colliders and stage and velocity rigging from previous day.

Mardini Day 27 – Snow

Frozen lens, frozen world.
Somewhere behind the silence, a story is melting.

--

SOP/Copernicus snowflake baked textures -> POPnet with textured quads -> Karma transmission material with opacity

Yes, it's late but it's present and accounted for and I'm not entirely unhappy with the results, and reasonably happy with my growth.

Thank you fellow Mardini folks for sharing your growth and your works here, you inspire me.

see you soon,
—alan/organic ❄️

Mardini 2025 – Day 26 – Melt

Steam pouring through the pipes now, flowing into the glacier field.

The pipe didn’t just flow — it spoke - and the land listened.

The Snow came early, who knew.

see you soon,
– alan/organic

Mardini 2025 - Day 25 – Flood (VFX: DOPS)

The terrain is the stage now with all the recent groundwork paying off: layered heightfields, basic textured terrain materials, and camera-ready ridges to catch the light just right.

This is what's left of an attempt to use this hose and flow to knock down a structure, but RBDPackedObjects kept hanging my machine, I'm sure it's something I did wrong, oh well, no more time for this.

Anyway, just fluid surface meshed and lit like an angry god’s signature. This was more about motion implied than motion observed: mild head radiating off the form (needed some heat mirage in the air too, I suppose) and the feeling that something far away has begun breaking loose.

I didn’t go overboard with chaos — just enough to catch the soul of a "flood" in a single frame. Still missing more atmospherics but the silhouette reads and the energy is there.

Call it a slow-motion scream.

See you yesterday
-alan

Tonight’s entry cracked me open a little.

It started as a simple continuation of the stage, but then became something heavier, more symbolic. I spent a few hours sculpting RBD destruction, peeling back the world just enough to let something radiant escape. It was meant to be an explosion, but what emerged felt more like a birth. "The chrysalis wasn’t shattered—it was opened." I wanted the let the spark of yesterday ignite today...leaving behind the husk of something sacred and spent.

I didn’t get to the volumetrics in time—no golden vapor trails or atmospheric haze spiraling into the night, and I didn't fracture the pylons and ground and all of that, but somehow, I’m okay with what this became. What’s here feels honest for the time I had.

The broken wings, the cracked geode shell, the burst of light that can’t quite be contained—it all hints at motion, at intention. "You don’t leave the nest—you rupture it." And maybe, just maybe, “we thought it was a weapon—it was a birth.” Still frames have to work harder to tell the truth. I think this one does.

see you soon,
-alan

Mardini Day 21 – Week 3 – KineFX – Fly

Carried forward the stage, lighting, and general style from the last couple days, but broke away from the terrestrial when it came time to make something fly.

The wings are driven by a super simple rig and flapping poses - wrapped into a simple character using a point deform workflow. All rigging and animation handled in KineFX again, which made it easy to prototype IK posing and blending, again

This one was all about suggestion, a creature more implied than fully designed, catching the light as it rises, leveraging the moody stage lighting I’d left in place when I arrived here tonight to make something.

I went stylized with the wings: layered plating with an almost feathery falloff, thanks to some subtle transmission in the material. I leaned into the dramatic upward lighting and deep shadows on the stage to silhouette the shape in flight.

Didn’t get bogged down in complexity today. Just trying to stay loose and have fun this month with all of you. These one-to-two-hour daily builds are starting to feel like quickfire sketches, fast captures of ideas before they dissolve... it's been awhile, and it feels good.

Sadly, I started on this with less than hour to go before the deadline, so this entry is indeed late, but I like the way it turned out and I'm setting it free here to roam with you.

Thanks to everyone for the inspiration!

See you tomorrow,
—alan/organic

Still squeezing in time where I can. Today’s entry was all about slithering. But instead of just laying down a procedural sine wave and calling it a day, I leaned into KineFX to give it some actual rigged articulation. (to be fair, almost did drive my rig with a sine wave, but decided to focus on the pose instead for now)

So, I built a simple but swept snake with vdb's and then rigged it using the base curve, then leveraged an IK setup and some rig posing to make the shot. I wanted something that looked controlled, something that felt alive, with the head leading and the body following naturally.

The materials and lighting were mostly re-used and tweaked for this composition, but I’m happy with how the iridescence pops against the deep blue environment. The materials are a combination of SOP-based coloring and COP2 for the scales and Mtlx to bring it together. Some glow and here we are.

Onward!
- alan/organic

ETA: uploaded wrong render file, happy with it now

Thanks for creating and sharing such wonderful works!! Everyone is doing a fine job, keep it up!

I've been busy slaying other beasts this week, but I'm still carving out a few hours here and there to make an attempt at a solid entry each day. And though I've missed a few, the goal when I'm here workign on an entry is just that -- to be here now, to grow… to try to get better at things I need to become better at. And, occasionally, flex when I can. This isn't that, but hopefully that opportunity will arise before the month is up.

For today’s entry, I flipped crawl on its head and went with a climb instead.

I took the procedural creature rig whipped up for yesterday’s entry and leveraged the IK setup to navigate a steep incline. The goal was to create something that felt dynamic and weighty and on the move, a creature deliberately scaling its environment rather than just moving across it. I’m not sure how close I got, but with less than two hours from start to finish, including render and post, I’ll take it.

This was a fun exercise in refining control over procedural rigging—tweaking an existing setup, adjusting poses, fine-tuning composition, and pushing the render. Houdini’s KineFX tools really helped here, fitting right in with the week’s prompts.

The lighting was a last-minute push, but I’m happy with how it came out, feels like this thing is climbing toward something unknown… or maybe just trying to escape.

See you soon,
-alan/organic

For today's piece, I went full alien arthropod. Built a procedural multi-limbed critter from scratch, starting with simple forms and iterating through layering shapes and details, though another two passes would be desirable for more polish...still.

The goal was to keep things loose and exploratory while still feeling biomechanical and purposeful. I rigged it up with a quick pose system with full body ik and some fk to roll up the arms with a rig wrangle and some rotatations. Used the ik to get some attitude into the stance, then put it into the stage from previous days for some basic lighting.

It’d been a while since I’ve done a fully parametric rigged critter from scratch in a single sop --- so this was a refreshing break from the workflows of the last few days, though it's tough to capture the daily theme in a single image using this approach.

Definitely some areas I’d revisit, but overall I'm happy.

see you soon,
-alan

For Day 16: Jump, I completely re-used the parametric biped rig and stage from Day 15 and built on it, this time focusing on more movement and motion sequencing, and in a more narrative context.

Using follow-curve animation style with splines, I drove a "freeze-frame" / "strobe light" effect by duplicating the rigs along motion guides. Then added some remap/ramp combos as parametric controls -- with these in place, I could tweak spacing, timing, and pose blending to fine-tune the look and feel of the jump arc. Too bad I didn't get it done before the deadline, this one might have had a shot at a vote or too ... maybe

This was a fun exercise and it has given some new ideas too. The flexibility of the rigging and scaffolding I built up made it easy to iterate, and KineFX once-again proved it's usefulness as a solid tool for handling custom animation ideations in practice.

Thanks and shoutout to the folks at SideFX and the folks participating in Mardini 2025, great work!

see you soon,
-alan/organic

Built a fully parametric biped rig and dusted off some KineFX workflow skills for today's piece. Used rig pose and blend to quickly block in the motion, then leaned into velocity blur to capture the sense of movement I had in mind earlier this evening.

I’ve been feeling rusty, so this was a solid exercise...getting comfortable again with procedural rigging while working toward a stylized aesthetic to bring this still image to life in alignment with today's RUN prompt.

Happy with the direction, and there’s more to come!

See you tomorrow,
-alan

Ran into some snags on this one—broke my seams, scrambled to fix them, then managed to wreck the material right before rendering. What should’ve been a quick one-hour session stretched closer to ninety minutes, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

I took the seahorse model from Day 07 and added procedural scales using SOP geo with point attribs to drive the COPS directly -- though it’s still a bit too basic for my liking.

Given more time, I’d refine the attributes on the geo to drive material blending and make the appendages stand out differently, and use those in a full Karma material builder setup instead of driving everything through COPS textures only on a simple surface material --- but for now, I’m calling it a win just getting this one across the finish line.

Lessons learned, and moving forward!

see you soon,
-alan