Fudged Up!
Inside a high-containment lab, Test Subject #25 is injected with an experimental anti-aging therapy. The trial goes sideways fast—triggering a violent, localized mutation that causes the muscle groups in the arm to swell, contract, and expand out of control.
A full end-to-end CFX character pipeline, pushed as far as it could go without ever leaving Houdini.
Approach & Development
I started by laying down the motion foundation, capturing base performance data with Rokoko and retargeting it straight onto a custom rig using KineFX. From there, I built out a procedural skeleton-to-muscle anatomical system to act as my base layer.
The immediate problem: standard Houdini Muscle workflows rely on bone angles and joint distances to tell muscles when to contract. But in a mutation beat where the arm isn't moving much—yet the tissue itself is violently swelling—joint-driven activation gave me zero usable contraction data and broke volume preservation.
To sell the reaction in the shot, I also built a secondary environment pass: heavy chamber atmospherics and a fluid/cavitation bubble simulation using POP and Pyro to ground the muscle reaction in physical space.
Every lab prop, mesh and texture was built to hold up under extreme volumetric strain.
Procedural Modeling & Texturing
To set the scene and house the character FX, I built out the environmental assets, lab props, and anatomical mesh adjustments directly in Houdini.
Procedural Modeling: Designed and proceduralized the lab containment environment and prop hardware inside Houdini. I also refined the underlying character base geometry to ensure clean topology for physical simulation, establishing precise muscle anchor points and proper volumetric clearance for the extreme deformation to come.
Texturing & Lookdev in Substance Painter: Exported UV-unwrapped environment and character assets into Substance Painter to author multi-layer texture sets. For the character, I authored specialized maps for Subsurface Scattering (SSS), micro-creasing, surface tension, and skin pallor shifts—ensuring the skin material reacted believably under high volumetric strain during the transformation beat.
