For this project, I worked alongside two of my peers on a collaborative short film. Our goal was to create a flowing narrative that featured three parts, one made by each of us, that presented changes in each part. We focused more on cinematic techniques and environment features than a complex main character. As a result, we decided to use a sphere that goes through changes through each part. The three of us collaborated throughout the process constructing a cohesive vision and providing feedback to each other's work. Additionally, we focused on thematic structures that could join the portions together.
My biggest source of inspiration was floating candle lanterns. I love the warm glow they create in the dark sky or as a reflection on some surface. I wanted to focus on the reflections for this project as with the tight environment we would get a change from before and after.
The biggest hurdle was the lights themselves. There are over 200 light bulbs within the narrow hallway. This presented two hurdles: how to give some 'character' to the individual bulbs, and how to not destroy my rendering times. For the first part, I knew addressing this through a VEX node would be the best solution. I took the positional value of each point that the light bulb was attached to and tied them to a sin wave to create a wave effect. As the frames would move forward, the bulbs would move along the wave. Eventually, I would like to come back and make this effect a bit stronger so that the wave is more noticeable. I didn't want to take too much attention away from the ball itself so I limited how large the peaks and valleys were. I think making this effect more extreme would create a more interesting image. Additionally, I would like to add a functionality where the points of the bulbs react the the position of the ball itself. Maybe they get pulled down closer wherever the ball is. For the next part, I was able to utilize the new light instancing feature in Houdini. This proved to work perfectly as I would get all the benefits of having that many lights but without the dramatic resource increase. I created a point cloud from a grid which would be the points that the bulb would be instanced onto. This proved to be most efficient as I was able to get rendering times down to about 3 minutes on my computer setup. I would like to go back and dive more into the instancing feature within Houdini and see if there is a way for me to make this more efficient or to have more control over the instancing process.
While this project was more of an artistic one, I was still able to employ some technical skills through my use of VEX. This was a really rewarding project as I was able to be technical and creative to get a nice final result. My portion of the film, found below, is the first 5 shots which is about 45 seconds.
