3D Visual Effects Demo Reel

3D Visual Effects Demo Reel

Fall 2020 Demo Reel featuring animations and effects made in Houdini and Unity.

Halcyon Night can be downloaded and played at https://grant-doney.itch.io/halcyon-night

The full animations are available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9fuCfFhSXfBTE6m6b92xd7ZPiXBxOIVJ

Music Visualizer (Fall, 2020) - Converts the full waveform of the music into a time based data set. That data is then applied to each polygon face of a grid modified by the blue value and stored as the attribute blueDist. Each frame, the face is extruded by blueDist, creating the animation. This animation was created and rendered in Houdini 18.

Halcyon Night (Fall 2019 - Spring 2020) - A game focused on peering through portals to the past, unraveling events, and fixing the present. The effect uses render textures and multiple cameras in separate versions of the environment to mimic a portal in space. The edge effect was achieved by moving in the Z direction through 3d noise with a mask for the center of the portal and the controllable thickness. Other effects present in the game include fractured objects made in Houdini, firework particle explosions, and controllable dissolve shaders made in Unity 2019.

Lava Simulation (Spring 2020) - A modified FLIP simulation in Houdini 18 where each particle carries a temp attribute which ticks down over time. This temp attribute effects the local viscosity, velocity, and color to create the appearance of lava cooling. Created in Houdini 18.

Apparition (Fall 2020) - A modulating deformed sphere moves through space along multiple sine waves with 2 particles simulations attached. The first simulation creates the main stream, with each particle's color determined by their velocity on a scale from purple to light pink. The second simulation creates considerably fewer particles which each have a geometry light attached to them, making the sparkly lights. The space itself is a VDB volume to simulate volumetric lighting. Created in Houdini 18.

Gravity Fracture (Spring 2020) - Initially an experiment with creating art directable fractures through implosion, the angular velocity and force of the implosion created a more interesting effect with the sphere collapsing into a spinning galaxy. The piece color is determined by the active force on that frame, a holdover from debugging the simulation which added to the effect. Created in Houdini 18.