CODERCAT HIGHLIGHT

FLOWER BLOOMS

For this campaign, the team on site in Los Angeles created a floral lagoon, and our task was to bring it to life with a layer of 3D blooming flowers! Before even seeing the footage, I got started researching. I knew from looking at the moodboards that a procedural system would be the way to go, since the shots called for a variation in flower types and levels of detail.
After browsing several tutorials I created a custom procedural setup involving KineFX rigged petals, phyllotaxis, and vellum simulations. With this setup, I could change the flower petal shape and distrubtion to create a wide array of looks!

Some flowers got special treatment of course.

Once the footage came in, I started designing flowers that would match the beautiful arrangement they created on physically set.. but also give the scene a surreal twist. Finding that balance was really fun.

LAYOUT

First step was a sketch to get ourselves and collaborators on the same page about the distribution of flowers and general flow of movement for each of the shots. Kif made these lovely sketches (in Blender by the way) to do so!

In parallel, Kif was devloping the pipeline for layout and scene development. Traditionally we would export the flower assets as alembics from Houdini, and load them in Blender for layout and timing. However for this project, it seemed to us that handling the animation of 100 or more flowers manually in Blender could be a nightmare.

Kif pushed for the bold move of setting up the scene with USD in Solaris. We felt that the instancing tools and procedural nature of Houdini would allow for smoother iterations.

I can't say for sure if we were right or wrong. There were MANY hurdles along the way. Big Con, the layout tools are terrible in Houdini, so bad that Kif actually made his own custom USD Export to Blender that allowed him to do the flower layout in Blender and import it back as instances in Houdini.

Big Pro, updating assets and materials was very smooth, and you can make... a procedural flower field... in just a few minutes...

THANKS TO

Chevy Tyler - Creative Director x Director of Photography

Greg Swales - Creative Director x Director

{full production credits on their pages}