I’ve wanted to execute this experimental procedural braiding / weaving effect for years now, and finally stumbled upon the skills to do so after taking a simple math in Houdini course. Here are the results:

Now let’s get into the weeds.

Inspired by the Nike Biomorph ad that came out a while back, we were allowed to alpha test Redshift on an eGPU and we were quite impressed with the relative speed and quality of the renders over our traditional CPU based rendering pipeline.

Extreme Depth of Field

Rendering with baked-in motion blur and depth of field tends to be a scary process for a number of reasons, which is why we usually handle it in compositing. Alhough the compositing technique yields a less-accurate result, it’s perfectly acceptable in most cases. But for this project, we wanted to really stress-test the renderer with extreme depth of field that would be impossible to believably fake with a depth pass in post. The speed of the GPU renderer allowed us to confidently animate more optically correct focus-pulls at insane f-stops of 0.06 and lower before kicking off the final output.

Thanks for watching and we’ll hopefully see you soon with more experiments!