Baptiste Malbranque

The characters of Coeur de Neige have complexe designs with robotic and organic elements. We wanted to be able to model them without a big restrection of resolution for skinning, and be able to iterate different cloth/hair/shaders to get multiple characters.

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Python helped us to take full advantage the procedural power of houdini, without any manual manipulation (automatized), directly from our Maya work scenes.

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What's interesting with this process, is that you can then build anykind of procedural houdini setup, to process geometry, or anything you can think of, and integrate it wherever you want in your pipeline to be run in background.

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I created in Houdini the setup to adapt the animation of the low poly to the high polys, using some different deformation techniques depending on characters and parts of the body.

The setup allowed us to get the cloth deformed, that could be used as guide for the simulation after.

We also deformed the hair at this stage, with the same setup/file.

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Using Python, I developped a complete pipeline tool for baking our character animations from Maya, and having all the character post-processing automatized in background.

This is basically some exports and imports UI (for animators and lighters), to handle the characters of our film.

Depending on the settings chosen by the artists, it would bake out the animation in the project folders, and use houdini in background, opening the appropriate setups, and cache out the result back in the appropriate folders.

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