Hoppers
My final film at Pixar was Hoppers. I was a technical lead on an internal vegetation authoring tool called “Blossom.”
Blossom is a Houdini plugin that aims to leverage the procedural workflow and asset authoring capabilities of Houdini while simultaneously abstracting some of the more technical aspects of the software. It’s nodes are meant to be self-contained and enable non-Houdini users to easily jump in and author trees, plants, and other vegetation assets.
The Hoppers production used Blossom to create many of the beautiful trees and vegetation assets seen in the film. It was especially useful for the more stylized trees where we could design specific stylization operations.
Blossom UI
A quick example of the procedural workflow in Blossom. The nodes were highly optimized to make it run as close to real time as possible.
Blossom Nodes
We built tons of nodes for various operations such as modeling, deforming, adding leaves, and even editing trunk geometry in Maya.
The goal was to make a plugin so polished, it felt like its own software.
