Topstep Winter Olympics
This was a project I worked on as a Houdini Lead Artist at Scholar for Topstep’s Winter Olympics campaign. The films combined live action with large-scale CG environments, using mountains, monoliths and transforming cityscapes to bring the world of trading into something more physical and cinematic. My role focused on leading the Houdini team. Together, we developed different procedural systems that allowed us to “build out” the environments.
Design Process
Houdini R&D
Houdini was a great tool for this project. We needed to create a large number of mountains and landscapes, so I decided to try out a new tool called KTT. It allowed me to quickly create highly detailed mountains while still giving me the flexibility to iterate on them. All of the movement in the landscapes comes from volume noise, and I used MOPs Camera Blender to animate the cameras throughout the project.
Snow Piles
A smaller part of this project involved developing a quick system to generate a variety of “snow piles.” There was footage of Alex skiing down a slope, but the monoliths and surrounding snow needed to be created in CG and comped into the shot. I used Vellum grains to build a procedural system where I could quickly change the seed and a few key parameters, allowing me to generate 20–30 different variations in a very short amount of time.
Client: Hello Scholar
Date: October 2025
Software: Houdini, Redshift