Overview
This project centred on two Houdini Digital Assets built for the Pepsi Neon Superbowl branding campaign: a neon sign generator and a dew drop population tool. Both HDAs were designed to be used directly by artists without requiring Houdini expertise, with clean interfaces exposing the parameters that mattered and handling all of the underlying geometry and simulation work internally.
Neon Generator HDA
The neon generator takes an input SVG, PNG, or PSD file and automatically builds the full neon sign geometry from it, including the glass tube surfaces, simulated support wires, and animated group sequences. The tool reads layer structure from the input file and uses it to organise the sign into independently controllable sections.
The interface includes controls for vertically offsetting wires to resolve intersecting geometry without manual adjustments, tube sizing and bend quality, layer-based grouping overrides, and a selection of animation styles for the light-on sequences. Because the geometry is entirely driven by the input artwork, creating a new sign variant required nothing more than swapping the source file.
Dew Drop HDA
A companion tool for populating and animating water droplets on the soda can surface. The HDA scatters droplets across the can geometry using a customisable distribution, with controls for size variation, density, and the hand-drawn style animation that gave the spots their distinctive look. Lookdev and lighting for the can were also handled as part of this work, with the droplet shader built to respond correctly to the studio lighting environment and produce convincing refractive and specular behaviour on the water surface.