“Harmony”
Walt Disney Animation Studios training project
This piece was created with the idea of opposing forces, or harmony and chaos in mind. I wanted to challenge myself to push the designs of the golden harmony magic to feel beautiful and ethereal, while the red chaos magic felt frenzied and sharp. Timing was key here as I only had 100 frames to convey a state change, and I relied heavily on 2D animation beforehand to work out this timing before getting into solvers. For the liquid and splash, I was inspired by Fantasia’s arcing water movements, and ended up developing a unique approach using FLIP and custom trails to create this in 3D.
Responsible for: All aspects aside from bucket model and animation.
Software: Houdini, Hyperion, Harmony, and Nuke.
Harmony and Chaos: I wanted to convey a state change from one opposite to another, and the corruption of harmonious magic to chaos sounded like a fun challenge! I only had 100 frames to execute this shot, so I worked out my timing first in 2D to make sure everything was reading correctly. I then created and animated curves and geometry which became a source for the particles and pyro to follow. The corruption needed to happen quickly but be readable, so I created a solver to “infect” the harmony magic over a specified period of frames.
Golden splash: The harmony magic starts in liquid, and I have always been inspired by how traditional animators animate such beautiful arcing splashes like in Disney’s Fantasia, “Pastoral Symphony” segment. I considered 4 different approaches to this, procedural geometry, vellum fluids, POPs, and FLIP. I ended up going with FLIP and creating custom trails from the particles to accentuate the arcing motion.
Harmony vs Chaos: The harmony magic needed to feel more ethereal and swirly, while the chaos magic felt unstable and aggressive. Varying the sourcing as well as velocities were what I relied on most to convey this state change, despite both being made up of the same elements.
Explosion: The shot ends with the chaos exploding outward. During my 2D pencil test, I drew a sharp, star shaped explosion, and decided to try sourcing the pyro from my drawing. I ran the source on 2s, so that the motion felt stepped and unhinged, and found that the timing was much easier to get right when the simulation relied on a drawing that was already animated with the timing I was looking for!