Andrés Salazar Work
  Experiments Reel About

Mono Sculptures

 A procedural exploration of glass sculptures inspired by the work of Isabelle Mono, focused on capturing the material richness and spontaneity of glass through a generative 3D system.
Brief: Translate the qualities of glass sculpture into a digital process that can produce unique forms while preserving a sense of material and imperfection.

Challenge: Isabelle Mono’s work reflects a deep exploration of glass as a material, where color, transparency, and form feel tactile. The challenge was to create digital work that does not feel overly synthetic, but instead conveys the imperfection, and subtle complexity of real glass.

Outcome: Developed a Houdini-based system to generate glass-like forms through controlled randomness, allowing color, shape, and internal composition to change organically. The process focuses on iterating without exact control and embracing the imperfection like the actual process of making glass sculptures.




                      


ProcessCombining the procedural capabilities of Houdini I created a controller with the 3 effects and various characteristics that you can tweak to create different sculptures. Instead of creating sculptures one by one, I decided to try out a Houdini workflow called TOPs or Task Operators. With this I was able to create 150 different sculptures by automatically changing the parameters from the controller with random numbers generated by Houdini.After having the 150 different sculptures, I was able to lay them out in a sequence to render as different stills. Utilizing different attributes stored before the render I was able to use different masks to create dynamic procedural shaders for the inside of the sculptures. The only problem with this was that all the sculptures had the same color, so I created a specific attribute dependent on the frame number and a random seed to be able to change the hue in a procedural way.


Andrés Salazar
3D Designer & Art Director