Sonic The Hedgehog: 2
“Sonic the Hedgehog 2” was a project I helped completed during my time as a Lead Technical Director at Moving Picture Company
This movie featured furry animals, missiles, trails, water, tornados and explosions that had been generated using a Houdini-based Automation Workflow that I had developed.
Houdini Automation Framework
The main challenge on Sonic 2 was being able to batch simulate the same asset for more than a thousand shots. Some examples are the characteristics of Sonic’s fur, the same type of missiles or the water in the environment being identical between shots.
Prior to the workflow, manual labor was needed to open up the asset template and tailor it on a per-shot basis. This involves bringing in shot-specific variations of every required asset, such as how Sonic had been animated. This could take an artist up to 2 hours per shot.
I provided a solution which at it’s core, move these steps to the background and automates them, allowing a higher throughput of shots and bringing the focus onto the artistic value of the show. The framework consisted of;
- A one-click solution to deploying and modifying asset templates
- Implementing version control of templates
- Providing both a UI (PyQt) and a CLI method of submitting batch jobs
- Developed a plug-in based architecture so that the workflow can be extended in the future
- Integrated the workflow into Houdini Shelves and a set of spare parameters