Sketching Ideas is a VFX scene that lets you see the sketching process like never before. The artist, wildWillowPillow, made an extreme close-up shot where the tip of the graphite pencil looks like a giant stone wall with gray dust and graphite rocks flying from underneath it as it glides across the paper. 

To have a basic idea of how things look and how they move in the scene, wildWillowPillow first blocked everything out with a basic RBD setup. Then they moved on to modelling the main object in the scene, the pencil, using procedural sculpting. The final model you see in the scene has less detailed geometry, however. 

After that came the base render, where the artist established their art direction for the scene, tweaked the initial sculpt of the pencil so that it fit the camera better, and made the first material try-on. The first materials they chose made the pencil tip look a bit too matte, so at the following stage wildWillowPillow swapped their materials for shinier, more reflective ones. 

In the final steps of the process, the artist created a secondary simulation for smoke and mini particles, fixed some glitching in the scene, and added sound effects for a more immersive experience. They used the same RBD setup throughout the whole process, the only difference being the amount of detail in the scene. As the creator pointed out, the RBD setup they used is a very basic one, and you can find it in "any 'dissolving' constraint tutorial with dust layers."

If you liked wildWillowPillow's particle simulation, check out more of their Houdini effects on Reddit.

Want to see more hypnotizing Houdini simulations? Check out this goofy animation of a bendy pencil by Tomasz Woźniakowski, this pencil sharpening 3D animation by Victor Verdugo, and this coral growth simulation by Iman Vafaei.

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