Mono Sculptures

This project is inspired by the work of the French glass artist Isabelle Mono. I had the opportunity of meeting her in the summer of 2010 where she gave me one of her sculptures as a gift (see picture below). I was fascinated by the way the sculpture seems to have captured an instant of color and froze it in a bulb of glass. With this in mind, I started exploring a procedural system in Houdini that could create random glass sculptures.

Music: Gosh - Jamie XX

Isabelle Mono - 06/22/2000

Combining 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.