We were approached by the marketing department of Magneti Marelli, by the end of 2016, to make an institutional video, fully cgi, to showcase some of their products and how they are paving the way to a better future.
With just a month to build it and a handful of artists, we had to stay flexible and be able to make changes until very close to the deadline.
To workaround those limitations, we used a mix of traditional modeling and procedural modeling. The base assets were built by a professional modeler, and then brought to Houdini, where they were copied and adjusted to the path of the tunnel.
Even the path of the tunnel was changed during the final phase of the project without any hassle. Just updated the path from the alembic file, pressed the export button and we were done.
The props were instanced, positioned and adjusted to follow the tunnel path inside Houdini.
Math was used to give us precise control over the orientations of each piece, allowing for a organic distribution of the elements.
The city was built using measured topology data from São Paulo, and the buildings were distributed using ground area size analysis.
