Breakdown: How Houdini Is Reshaping Commercial Animation
Ezequiel Grand discussed how Houdini transformed his approach to commercial animation and VFX, explaining what pushed him to build a procedural house generator, covering some of the major projects he has worked on, and detailing six tips for building efficient procedural setups.
Introduction
My name is Ezequiel Grand, an Argentinian 3D Artist currently based in Los Angeles, California. I began my career in 2010 after graduating as a Graphic Designer from UNSTA in Argentina. My path into 3D wasn't immediate. I initially worked in graphic and web design before becoming increasingly interested in motion graphics, which led me to After Effects and eventually to Cinema 4D, my first dedicated 3D package.
As my work became more technically demanding, I started looking for a tool that would give me greater control over both animation and effects. That search eventually led me to Houdini. What initially attracted me to Houdini was its reputation as an FX package, but I quickly realized that its real strength went far beyond simulations.
It could be used for animation, procedural modeling, motion design, tool development, VFX, and building entire systems capable of generating new variations automatically. That procedural way of thinking gradually changed not only the software I used, but also the way I approached creative problems.
From Commercials to Concert Visuals
Throughout my career, I've had the opportunity to work on a wide range of projects, including commercial work for brands such as Apple, Nike, Adidas, Pepsi, FOX, FIFA, and Cartier, as well as concert visuals and content involving artists such as Shakira, Black Eyed Peas, Paul McCartney, and Justin Bieber. I've also contributed to projects connected to events such as the MTV Video Music Awards, League of Legends Finals, Billboard events, and TEDx.
The projects themselves can be very different, but they often share the same challenge: commercial production moves fast. Deadlines can be short, creative directions can change quickly, and clients often need to see multiple variations before reaching the final result. This is where Houdini became particularly valuable to me.
When Houdini Became My Main Tool
I still remember one of my first professional projects using Houdini. It was around 2018, and I had only been learning the software for approximately six months when I was contacted to work on visuals for Paul McCartney's Freshen Up Tour. The project required the creation of several different environments, including desert and underwater worlds, involving terrain generation, FLIP waterfall simulations, grain simulations, and large numbers of buildings and environmental elements.
One of the challenges was creating many different houses in a short amount of time. Modeling every building manually would have been extremely time-consuming, particularly considering the production schedule. Instead, I built a procedural house generator in Houdini. The system exposed parameters for building dimensions, height, number of windows, roof design, and other architectural features. Rather than modeling every house individually, I could generate many variations from the same procedural system.
I applied the same idea to the underwater environment, where I created another procedural system for generating different coral formations.
That project became an important moment in my relationship with Houdini. I realized that instead of asking, "How do I create this object?", I could start asking, "How do I build a system capable of creating many versions of this object?" That distinction became fundamental to the way I work today.
The Shift Toward Procedural Commercial Workflows
One of the biggest advantages of procedural workflows is not simply that they can make production faster. More importantly, they make projects adaptable. In more traditional or destructive workflows, a significant creative change can sometimes mean rebuilding large portions of an effect or asset. In Houdini, I try to build my setups so that the fundamental creative decisions remain exposed as parameters.
Going back to the house generator, if a production required 50 different buildings, I wouldn't necessarily need to model 50 individual assets. Instead, the HDA could expose controls for dimensions, floors, windows, roofs, proportions, and other attributes. This allowed the system to generate a large number of variations while maintaining a consistent visual language.
This becomes particularly powerful in commercial work because client feedback is part of the creative process. Requests such as "Can we make it taller?", "Can we try this with a different object?", or "Can we create twenty variations?" don't necessarily require rebuilding the work. If the system has been designed correctly, these become parameter changes rather than production problems.
Designing Effects That Survive Client Changes
Another example came from a project for MDL Beast Festival:
I was developing grain simulations that needed to reveal different graphic patterns. Instead of building an individual simulation for every piece of content, I designed the setup around an interchangeable source.
The source could be a video, image, or graphic pattern, while the rest of the system handled its transformation into the simulation. That meant I could feed completely different imagery into the same setup and quickly generate new pieces while maintaining the same visual behavior.
This is one of the ideas I find most valuable about Houdini: separating the content from the system that processes it. When those two things are properly separated, iteration becomes dramatically easier.
Houdini Beyond Traditional FX
Houdini is still strongly associated with large-scale FX, oceans, destruction, explosions, pyro, and similar simulations, but my own work has increasingly shown me how useful it can be outside those traditional applications. I've used Houdini for abstract commercial animation, procedural typography, graphic design animation, procedural modeling, character-related effects, growth systems, and tools capable of automatically generating complex assets.
One recent project with Estudi-Image, for example, required a much more graphic, almost 2D-inspired visual language. I particularly enjoyed that project because it allowed me to reconnect with my background in graphic design while approaching the animation through Houdini. Rather than treating Houdini purely as a simulation package, I could use its procedural nature as a design tool.
Building Reusable Effects for FIFA 22
Another good example was the FIFA 22 Reveal Trailer, where we created a combination of graphic effects around the football players.
The challenge wasn't simply creating one effect for one player. The system needed enough flexibility to work with different players and geometry while maintaining the same overall visual language.
I therefore built the effect procedurally, separating different components into layers, including lines, particles, typography, and other graphic elements. The player geometry effectively became an input to the system.
If updated geometry arrived from the client, I could replace the model at the beginning of the network and allow the downstream procedural setup to adapt to it. This is particularly useful in production because assets rarely remain completely unchanged from the beginning of a project to delivery. Building around that assumption makes the system much more resilient.
Combining Different Houdini Tools for Alien: Earth
One of my favorite recent projects was the announcement trailer for Alien: Earth, created in collaboration with Tendril. My R&D explored several different organic effects, including procedural webs, tearing skin, growing vascular structures, and snake-like forms moving toward the camera. What made this project particularly interesting was that there wasn't one single technique capable of solving everything.
Instead, I could combine several areas of Houdini depending on the behavior I needed. For example, FEM could help explore tearing and deformation of skin-like materials, while Vellum provided a useful foundation for web-like structures. POP-based systems and procedural growth techniques were also used for some of the organic movement and structures.
This is another reason Houdini has remained at the center of my workflow. I don't necessarily think about Houdini as a collection of separate tools – particles, Vellum, FEM, FLIP, procedural modeling, and so on. I think of them as building blocks that can be combined to design a solution for a specific creative problem. That freedom becomes especially valuable during R&D, when you often don't know exactly which technique will produce the final result when you begin.
Tendril – Alien: Earth R&D:
Tips for Efficient Setups in Production
Here are some tips that I've learned while working in production for over a decade:
- Don't make everything procedural just for the sake of it.
Sometimes building a huge procedural system takes longer than solving the shot directly. The important part is recognizing when proceduralism will actually provide value.
- Identify what is likely to change.
If the client is likely to change the model, text, colors, quantity, speed, or other creative variables, those are good candidates to expose as parameters.
- Separate input, processing, and output.
Keeping these stages organized makes it much easier to replace assets without breaking the entire setup.
- Build for iteration.
A good commercial setup shouldn't only generate one beautiful result; it should make it possible to generate ten strong variations quickly.
- Use caches and checkpoints strategically.
A change near the end of the network shouldn't force you to recalculate everything from the beginning.
- Know when to build an HDA.
If a system is likely to be reused, shared, or adjusted repeatedly, turning it into a well-designed HDA can make the workflow significantly more efficient.
Creative Freedom Through Proceduralism
Finally, I'd like to share a few personal Houdini experiments that explore proceduralism beyond client work and demonstrate how far a system can be pushed when experimentation becomes the main goal.
Procedural Robots
My fascination with procedural robot design started after watching Scott Robertson demonstrate generative design workflows in Modo. His presentation made me wonder how similar ideas could be adapted to Houdini's node-based procedural environment.
That question eventually developed into a series of procedural robot experiments, talks, walkthroughs, and reusable Houdini tools. I'm also sharing a Houdini HIP file for anyone who wants to explore the setup and learn from it.
Define a Strong Base Silhouette
Start simple. Create a base shape that will later serve as the main surface on which the hard-surface design is built. A simple low-poly T-pose body works well. UVs can also be useful later if you want to introduce textures or masks that can drive the generation of new shapes.
You can then introduce noise or displacement, combined with operations such as Clip and Mirror. Instead of working with a single fixed character silhouette, parameters such as Noise Type, Amplitude, Frequency, and Roughness can generate a much wider range of forms.
It can also be useful to separate the character into groups – arms, torso, head, and legs – so different procedural methods can be applied to each region later.
Generate Reusable Hard-Surface Components
Once the base silhouette is ready, the next step is to build hard-surface elements that can be reused and recombined. There are many ways to approach this in Houdini, and this is where experimentation becomes especially important. One method I particularly like is projecting vector shapes onto the character. For example, you can use Trace to import a vector shape, apply an End SOP, resample the curves, and then use Ray to project the design onto the target surface.
From there, PolyCap can fill the projected shape and Thickness can give it volume. Once you begin using multiple shapes — or assigning different shape families to the arms, torso, head, and other regions — the system can start producing increasingly distinctive characters.
Create HDAs and Drive Parameters Over Time
Each major stage can be turned into an HDA with exposed controls. For example, the initial character generator can include parameters that alter the silhouette over time. A Mountain SOP can vary its offset using a frame-based expression such as $F, producing a different silhouette on each frame and effectively turning the timeline into a generator of design variations.
The same approach can be used for hard-surface shapes. A switch or menu parameter can cycle between imported Illustrator vectors or shapes created directly inside Houdini. Combining these controls allows a relatively compact system to generate a large number of robot variations.
Create Hidden Complexity with Procedural Structures
Once the exterior hard-surface elements are in place, an internal skeleton or secondary structure can add another layer of visual complexity. One approach is to convert the base character to a VDB, run a VDB Analysis to generate a gradient field, and use that field with Volume Trail to create biological-looking internal structures.
Another approach is to use Shortest Path. You can define a small set of starting points – for example, the head, both hands, and both feet – and use a percentage of the remaining points as potential destinations. This can generate vein-like or structural paths throughout the character.
Explore Alternative Hard-Surface Techniques
There are many other ways to generate hard-surface details. For example, PolyReduce can create a very low-poly version of the character, which can then be developed with PolyExtrude. The extrusion ramp can be used to introduce more varied and interesting surface details.
Voronoi Fracture is another useful tool for generating panel-like structures. By controlling clusters and combining them with custom wrangles, you can also create circuit-like patterns that can then be projected onto almost any surface.
The important idea is not to rely on a single technique. Procedural design becomes much more interesting when multiple simple systems are layered together and exposed through a small set of meaningful controls.
Here are some useful links (talks / tutorials I did on Procedural Robots):
Conclusion
For me, proceduralism isn't about removing the artist from the process. It's about giving the artist more possibilities to explore. Instead of spending time rebuilding the same thing, I can spend that time asking: what else can this system become? That is ultimately what keeps Houdini at the center of my workflow. It gives me a way to approach commercial production efficiently while still leaving room for experimentation, iteration, and creative discovery.
