The Bloom

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.

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.