LogInTurbulence was made in Houdini.
Meet Mike, a fine fellow from Tumblehead's animated short movie Turbulence. He might look creepy in this shot, but he's actually quite nice and knows aerodynamics.
The film might be funny, but if you're afraid of turbulence, you might get some fashbacks, although the various colorful characters will definitely boost your mood.
The animation was done in Houdini by Magnus Møller, Christopher Rutledge, and Jesper Andkjær in collaboration with SideFX.
Tumblehead
"I think specifically the feeling that when you hit turbulence, you FEEL like you are going to die, but you look around and everyone else is acting completely normal, which in turn can make you feel either calm, or even more insane. I talked to Magnus about it and we thought that a film themed around turbulence would be a lot of fun and have a lot of potential for building fun effects and procedural setups, character acting, rigs, and animation," Rutledge shared.
The goal of the art side was "to lean into the amazing 'Tumblehead style' – but push it slightly towards the more grossly detailed 'Chris Rutledge' style."
All the shots were done with Houdini's COPS. The team had a pipeline "that would set up your shot automatically, based on render layers and AOV’s, based on Houdini’s new recipe system," which automated a lot of tasks.
"It was also really fun to play around with the NPR techniques, like adding outlines based on depth, 2D distortion based on UV AOV, etc. You can see all of these FX on the shots, where Jimmy (the main character) is freaking out. That’s all made with COPs. One major drawback with the current version of COPs that I want to mention, is that it is not optimized for *.exr files yet. I know this is a big priority for the next release, so just be aware of that limitation before you try to do something similar.
If you want to learn more about the workflow behind the short, read this article.
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