Buzz Stop
Join us in the city of Entomopia, where all methods of transportation are giant bugs! This VFX short film has a simple concept with a straightforward execution; 6 shots showcasing what the world would look like if your car was replaced by a snail, your train by a centipede and your bus by a buzz (bee).
For this project, I worked in a group of five as a Houdini generalist. My main achievements from this project were a procedural kineFX snail rig with ground collisions, a procedural triantipede generator and texturing for all creatures using Houdini 20.5 Copernicus only. This collaborative effort brought together diverse skills to create a cohesive world where transportation is reimagined through the lens of insect biology.
Year
2025
Duration
8 Weeks
Project Type
Group of 5
Grade
Distinction
Software used
Full Buzz
Buzz Breakdown
Bee
Textures +
dynamics
For the bee asset, I handled the body, face and wing textures
entirely in Houdini 20.5 Copernicus and applied dynamics to the groom made by my team member, Charlotte Foster.
Due to the organic, wavy looking nature of how snails move, we decided that a procedural kineFX based rig would be the best approach. So, for this asset I developed a rig with foot animation controls based on some simple sine and cosine waves and complete with ground interactions, animated all snails in the penultimate and final shot, as well as again handling the creature texturing (not including shells) in Copernicus.
Snail
Rig + animations
HDA Demo
This demo showcases how I utilised HDAs for pipeline purposes. I set up all of my team members' houdini environments to look at up a "/pipe/" directory within our project root directory for external HDAs. This way, I could develop assets as HDAs and push them out to my team members so they could just type in "snail" and get the latest version of the asset. I did the same for the bees and the traintipedes.
The above video showcases the ground interaction on the snail rig as well as an early stage of development of the snail textures. This particular render was focused on showcasing the translucent areas of the snail.
Procedural rig,
Procedural textures
Traintipede
Generator
Generator
demonstaraion
Similarly to the Snail HDA, the traintipede generator helped my teammembers easily integrate traintipedes into any shot simply by typing in the name of the HDA, plugging a curve into it and using the "position along curve" slider to anmiate it. The generator comes complete with textures (procedural texturing for the yellow to red gradient on the legs), and it works alongside the curve based bridge generator created by Yujia Cai
Simulate Antennae
To keep the traintipede antennae from looking static, we decided the best way to add some movement would be to simulate them sort of flowing along with the wind. I started the RnD on this quite early on in the project, but as other things ended up getting in the way, it wasn't actually implemented until the last week of the project, after our first pass was complete!
