Tentacles on the character Doctor Octopus were another thing that Houdini was used for, in particular to generate extra wires and geometry inside of them. When CFX was done, the webs would go through the procedural setup in Houdini and, depending on the variant they wanted, it would add spiral webs around the main core, and completely replace the eiffel with a more stylised and customizable one.” “Having this in their court was ideal,” says Farnsworth, “because of web-cloth interaction. That department had a web rig for simulating secondary motion and also added that ‘eiffel’ end-piece. To get the webs into shots, the animators used a ‘curve’ rig that would then go through CFX. The hideout and ‘wrapped up’ webs were packed with more small webs along with ‘knots’ randomly added into the structure.” Her web was much more ribbon-like and graceful looking just by tweaking a few parameters. We built on that and modified it for Gwen’s web. Mile’s and Peter’s web was very thin/fine and had a few extra spiral webs around the main core, with a graphic almost 2D looking ‘eiffel'. “Using one setup as the base, we were able to easily create unique web variations for some of the different Spider-Man characters as well as the webs in the Spider-Man hideout and the webs wrapped around Miles during one sequence.

Houdini was relied upon again here, especially for its procedural nature, as Farnsworth explains. Of course, Spider-Man would be nothing without his signature webs. This is just simply not possible in another program other than Houdini.” We also had to create a few custom boolean-based tools for creating stylised patterns and cuts. We used that in combination with some minor re-timing to really create a nice ‘punch’ and accentuate the action as desired. “Using 2D animation as inspiration,” adds Farnsworth, “we also did some fun timing experiments on rigid bodies, outputting the geometry on 2’s, and sometimes switching from 1’s to 2’s or vice versa to get us a unique ‘stepped’ look that matched what the character animation team was doing.

“The render side was nice and simple,” notes Farnsworth, “as we simply stored attributes for the hi-res image path, and simple things like age or alpha attributes so we could control a bit in the shader as well.” With that setup in place, the FX artists could use simple particle systems or hand-place these elements as needed, and focus on the timing and composition of the elements, without having to worry too much about rendering or the final look, since the render would match the viewport almost exactly. This is a common technique used in games, where instead of loading a specific frame of animation for every card, you only have to load a single image that has all the frames on it already and you modulate the UVs to switch frames.” “Being able to view the animations in real-time was really important to us,” says Farnsworth, “so we created sprite sheets for all the animations we were going to use. The same HDA also output a separate geometry for render. “He was able to provide us with a few explosion variations with multiple layers each, gun muzzle flash shapes, spark hit shapes, smoke, steam and flame elements.”Īt Imageworks, an HDA in Houdini was created that would allow artists to select images from the library and then view the animation in real-time in the viewport.

“We had him provide as many layers as he could for us, so we could mix and match as needed, and also place things in depth for the 3D stereo side of things, too,” details Farnsworth. He provided Imageworks with a small re-usable library of 2D FX, starting with an explosion. That artist was Alex Redfish, whose Vimeo demos exemplified a style that would fit the desired language of the film.

Houdini sidefx learn