CAROLINA HERRERA CONFIGURATOR
Carolina Herrera offers a custom-created lipstick. In their stores, screens display this offering, and Conex created the animation for those screens.
The original animation was made by the motion designer who preceded me at Conex and did amazing work using Cinema 4D. For the refresh, I wanted to take his approach to the next level by using Houdini's rigid body physics to create lifelike movement as the product spun through the air.
HOW I MADE IT
I am confident that creating this effect would be impossible in any other commerically available software besides Houdini.
Even with Houdini, it was challenging to keep the smaller charms from passing through the interlaced toruses. I eventually discovered that using a single torus as a rigid body object wasn't sufficient. Instead, I had to scatter a number of small spheres within the volume of the torus. These were packed together to move as one unit, and that motion was then mapped back onto the torus I ultimately rendered.
WHAT I LEARNED
From the precision of the RBD simulation to the realistic flow of the hair simulation for the tassels, there's no substitute for Houdini.
It's certainly not the easiest software to master, but it's absolutely worth it. More broadly, continuously upskilling and challenging yourself, then figuring it out, always pays off in the final results.