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Turbulence: Animating a Short Film in Houdini
Grin Machine and Tumblehead animators present a behind-the-scenes look at character rigging using Houdini 20.5's APEX system for a short film, demonstrating KineFX-based production workflows.
Abstract
Grin Machine and Tumblehead animators present the behind-the-scenes of their stylized short film Turbulence, built almost entirely in Houdini. Magnus covers rigging stylized cartoon characters with the new APEX system and KineFX, recreating his Maya face and eye rigs as reusable HDAs, building a blendshape system, and adding procedural CHOPs-based overlap and jiggle so animators can work on stepped poses and dial in overshoot and delay. Chris details a sweat-generator HDA using scatter, a point-deform-in-solver trick and POP nets for dripping droplets, plus new Copernicus COPs for procedural wet maps and tile-pattern seat textures read live into Karma XPU shaders via op: paths. The talk also shows Vellum CFX run inside Solaris to fix face intersections, the new wrinkle and sculpting SOPs, and procedural VDB cloud shaders, all assembled through a USD pipeline with Solaris look-dev HDAs and a shot builder.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / film breakdown (Houdini rigging and effects)
- Contributions
- Shows stylized cartoon rigging in Houdini's APEX and KineFX: reusable face/eye rigs as HDAs, a blendshape system, and CHOPs-based overlap and jiggle
- Demonstrates an effects pipeline: a sweat-generator HDA, POP-net droplets, Copernicus COPs wet maps and tile textures read live into Karma XPU via op: paths
- Walks through Vellum CFX inside Solaris for face intersections, new wrinkle and sculpting SOPs, and VDB cloud shaders assembled in a USD pipeline
- Context
- A production-workflow talk extending the KineFX-for-games procedural-rigging direction (Kruel's Houdini HIVE session) into a full stylized short-film pipeline on APEX, Solaris, and USD.Builds on: KineFX for Games | Luiz Kruel | Houdini 18.5 HIVE
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; the techniques are production-proven on the short film Turbulence and are tied to specific Houdini tools, so transferability depends on that software stack rather than general validation.
- Clarity
- Accessible as a tool-driven breakdown; one viewing conveys the approach, with rewatching useful only to capture specific node setups.
- How to read it
- Watch for the reusable-HDA and procedural-secondary-motion patterns (CHOPs overlap/jiggle, sweat/droplet networks, live op: textures); revisit individual segments when replicating a setup in Houdini, not for theory.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Designing Feathers Using Houdini at FOLKS | Amelie Goursat | Paris HIVE 2023 2023 / Houdini
- CFX Cloth and Hair at Unit Image 2022 / FMX
- Sketch-Based Controllers for Blendshape Facial Animation 2015 / Eurographics
- Direct manipulation of blendshapes using a sketch-based interface 2018 / Web3D
Keywords
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