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Play, download and edit the free video Stark Woolmark International FX Reel.

This is the majority of my work for The Woolmark International Prize for 2018. I had so much to show that I had to cull out a lot so that it wasn't 10 minutes long.

I was tasked with creating a 3 minute choreographed sequence that was projected onto an 18.5 meter(61 feet) wide wall - with a 90 degree split in the middle. On top of that, I created threads that would randomly be disrupted at certain times as a sort of pre-cursor. Essentially if you were standing in front of it, they looked like static threads, but would then have random motion that would settle back down.
Because everything was to scale and I needed the most flexibility out of the setup, I chose to go with the PBD Solver instead of the Wire Solver. This was in Houdini 16.5 before Vellum was introduced. Using PBD was hands down the right choice because it was very forgiving for the type of movement we were going for; bending, stretching, tons of collisions, and manipulation through VEX. When I had a creative block I would refer to one of my Trig books to see what interesting behavior I could get with VEX by using pure maths.
My personal favorite part that is now obsolete through PDG/TOPs - was how I handled the threads coming off the animated people. I had my entire setup but I didn't want to have to babysit the exporting process everytie a character was done simming. So through a series of relative references, conditions, proper Alembic naming, and the Wedge ROP - I was able to export the entire shot in one go. Essentially, it was smart enough to know which character it was simming, what distinct forces that character had, and proper export location.
For Rendering, we played with using a PolySpline to mesh the splines but it was pointless. Rendering as hair was far and away magnitudes faster. The benefit with that too was the way hair shaders inherintly work. It gave us the "wool" look at a starting point closer than if we had to use a standard diffuse shader.
Lastly, for actual rendering - we went with Redshift because it was fast. On my workstation I was running 3 Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti's and with all the bells and whistles frames at about 4k took less than 30 seconds. As fast as that is, the number of frames that needed to be rendered was just too much so we chose to go with a farm. We got super lucky because GridMarkets was beta testing Redshift on their farm and we were able to utilize that. It was great because they use their own ROP that you attach to your Render ROP and it uploads from there. Which, in our case most files were self contained and had no external files to read in so it was a matter of just rendering the splines as hair.
Working with Factory Fifteen is always fun for me because of the type of work they do. It's not often that I get to do abstract setups, so when I do it's like free sketching. Their lighting they do is beautiful and it's a joy to see it all come together.

Music: Zola Jesus - In Your Nature (David Lynch Remix)

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