LogInGnomon's student Gabriel Martinez showcased his fantastic project.
Gabriel Martinez aspires to work in the industry as a Creature and Character Technical Artist, so for his final term at Gnomon, he challenged himself to create a polar bear featuring grooming, rigging, facial motion capture, and advanced simulations of muscle, fat, skin, and hair, all completed within just ten weeks.
A wonderful project, the process began with rigging and setting up proper anatomy to support layered simulation. After completing the animation, Gabriel simulated muscles, and cleaning up intersecting muscle geometry was a major challenge, solved through a mix of manual and procedural methods. He then added fat for secondary motion and weight, followed by skin simulation, introducing sliding and wrinkling that added depth and realism beneath the fur.
"For the muscles to really feel real, you need to set up a system that will activate the muscles. Normally, Houdini's workflow includes manually placing tension lines for each muscle and manually connecting them. Using a procedural workflow, I was able to create every line you see here procedurally without needing any manual intervention; they were each named to match their respective normals and could all be connected to the muscles with a single click from a Python script made in Houdini."
Here's a close-up of the facial rig, built using a combination of blendshapes and joints driven by shared controllers. For this project, Gabriel used MocapX to capture his own facial expressions, featured in the main breakdown:
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