This model was produced as the second "VFX Challenge" set as part of my postgraduate studies in visual effects at George Brown College. "Sweets and more sweets...lots of sweets!" called on us to model, light and render sweets of some kind: candy, chocolate, cookies, etc. I chose to produce some pieces of 'rock', a hard British sweet that often has customised text or images through the middle, and to present them in and around a traditional sweet shop jar. I wanted to use science-related images as the interior colours to reflect my science background and fit with the name for the product: Science Rocks! After the initial model was completed, I added a second product – peppermint swirls – to add more interest and variety to the scene.
The whole project was completed in Houdini, except for the base label and sweet texture images, which were produced in Adobe Illustrator before being imported as base colour textures to Houdini materials. I used Mantra in Houdini for rendering, which was an excellent learning opportunity as this was the longest part of the process. I approached the project procedurally because I wanted to allow for art direction at any stage of the project and to utilise the power of Houdini's procedural workflow and simulation nodes, and it proved to be a fun and engaging process.
Each piece of candy was produced automatically by the network from one base shape, with different sizes, randomly generated cut edges and randomly assigned textures that can easily be changed using a handful of settings. The pieces were then distributed randomly to several grids of scattered points so that a rigid-body simulation could be run to fill the jars and drop a handful of pieces around the jars in a natural-looking manner. The final node network could easily be expanded to provide wider options and/or converted into a Houdini Digital Asset to pass on to other artists.