JELLYFISH PROJECT

JELLYFISH PROJECT

Jellyfish Project is a 3 part series in Houdini 18. 

it covers the Modeling, Animation, Vellum Simulation and LookDev using the new Karma Renderer and the new SOLARIS LOPs workflow.

Here's a timelapse of the full process, then you can check the breakdown of different parts in more detail.

Part 1 | Modeling and Animation

Starting from a  curve node and revolving it to subdivide for a smoother surface. I try to keep the curve node as low-poly as much as possible to be able to easily control it and use preview the subdivide node for the final shape. 

Then the deformation animation was quite challenging. However, it's much easier now with the new Bend tool in Houdini 18.

Part 2 | Vellum Setup

I then created a separate node for the Vellum Simulation. I created guides for the tentacles and the arms and then combined them into one vellum solver, caching it out using the vellum I/O. After that, I simply separated the guides again each to a separate SOP network and then used the guides to create Geometry accordingly.

The arms were tricky to get it right at first with the new Sweep node in Houdini 18, but I can definitely a much simpler setup now combining what used to take several nodes in the previous versions into one sweep node.

Part 3 | LOPs setup

The new LOPs system is still in its very early stages I guess. Nevertheless, I can see the potential in it becoming the standard tool for Lookdev in the future. The karma render is easy to set up but it crashed on me several times (since it's only in Beta). I am still trying to figure out a lot of the features available in LOPs. 

Some Post-production was then made in Photoshop for the final render.