top of page

Cascade

Cascading Effects & Sound Design

Project Description

Cascade is a personal project I've worked on over the course of months in 2022 - 2023 in between freelance work. As I have continued to work in Houdini I've found one of the more challenging scenarios I've run into beyond figuring out a particular effect is chaining effects together to have them come and go, interact with one another, and work in harmony side by side. Chaining effects together requires a whole extra suite of controls, parameter animation, and attribute exchange than working with an isolated effect. This project was an exercise in figuring out how one effect leads into the next how to change simulation behaviour to work with other simulations. In the end I was working with Vellum, Pyro, POPs & DOPs, lots of VDBs, a butt load of VEX and a little python. The final render was done in Redshift where nearly every material was making use of changing attributes pulled from the simulations. Something I realized I had done as I was getting ready for final render was avoid using any lights or HDRIs at any point. I didn't set out to do this but in the end all the lighting happens via emissive materials changing through fluctuating attribute values. This is also the first animation where I did all of the sound design myself. I started learning Ableton Live last summer and am particularly new to that whole process. I'm excited to explore more ways of having audio and data/simulation/modeling influence one another in the future.

Roles

Houdini: Vellum | Pyro | POPs | DOPs | VDBs | SOPs | Simulation | VEX & Python
Redshift: Rendering | Lighting | Materials
Sound Design in Ableton Live

bottom of page