Painting the View: First Attempt in Houdini (Patreon)

Hi again, everyone! Figured I've give y'all some more work in progress blogs before releasing my next project.

This animation was partly an excuse to try something new. The basic idea was Madelyn ejaculating over the camera, but I mainly wanted to use it as a test bed for figuring out a more convincing fluid workflow instead of relying on the simpler methods I’ve used before.

I started with the animation itself in Maya, getting Madelyn’s body movement, posing, timing, and the camera interaction feeling right before worrying too much about the fluid. Since the camera is so close to the action, a lot of the animation was really about making sure everything read properly from that one specific angle. There wasn’t much point spending time perfecting movement that would never actually be visible in the final shot.

This was also my first proper attempt at using Houdini for semen simulation. There was definitely a lot of trial and error involved, especially learning how the emitter, initial velocity, gravity, collisions, viscosity, and surface behaviour all interact. The goal was to get something that could shoot outward convincingly, hit the camera surface, then spread and run down it without looking like plain water.

One useful optimisation was cutting out simulation particles that were never going to enter the camera’s field of view. Fluid sims can get expensive very quickly, so there was no reason to keep calculating particles flying off somewhere the audience would never see. This whole animation was basically a learning exercise for me, but it gave me a much better starting point for using Houdini in future animations.