So Chris had the scene built in UE5 ready to be rendered, so I blended two deer animation data together with Houdini’s KineFX and used that deer geometry to layer FX simulations on the deer.
For this video there is two layers of animations on two parts of the deer.
Firstly, I want the focus to be on the horns of the deer so I split out the body and the horns of the deer.
Secondly, I started with the vines simulation, starting from the legs as it travel upwards towards the horns.
Since the horns are already separated from the body, I can manually time when I want the vine simulation to start on the horns. This setup gives me more control to art direct the vines’ animation.
Once the vines are done, the leaves are just copied to a fraction of the points on the vines. They are also animated to move along the curves of the vines to give them a more complex look to the deer.