Overview
This project required building a procedural animation of a vehicle assembling itself from an exploded view, along with lighting and lookdev work focused on semi-transparent materials. The client provided CAD source data, which needed significant processing before it was usable in production.
Asset Build and CAD Processing
The incoming CAD data arrived with a large number of nested groups, inconsistent naming, and incomplete UVs across many of the components. A Houdini SOP network was written to automatically process the geometry, clean up the group structure, and generate UV projections for parts that were missing them. This made the asset consistent enough to drive the rigging and animation systems downstream without manual intervention on each component.
Once cleaned, a group-based KineFX rig was built that used the part groupings as the basis for the assembly hierarchy. The explode animation was driven procedurally with offset timing per group, then blended with keyframed animation on hero parts such as the doors and panels where more precise control was needed.
Lighting and Materials
The piece was rendered in Houdini Karma. The key material challenge was achieving a convincing semi-transparent look across the vehicle body, which required a custom shader using Fresnel-based opacity control. This allowed the surface to read as solid at glancing angles while becoming transparent at normal incidence, giving the assembly sequence a clean, technical quality. Lighting was built to complement this effect, using a simple studio environment with controlled fill and rim passes to keep the transparency readable throughout the animation.