Steel Hunters · Houdini Solaris · USD animation
The challenge
Scattered animated trees were reusing the same source animation with identical timing. Across an environment, the repeated motion made the instancing obvious.
The approach
I built a Solaris workflow around reusable animation clips and instance retiming. USD value clips provide the animation source, while Retime Instances varies prototype playback timing. The saved setup uses random offsets, allowing the same animation to appear at different phases across the scatter.
The value
The approach adds temporal variation while retaining reusable animated assets. It addresses a specific visual problem in environment assembly: a forest can share animation sources without every tree moving in step.
