A Houdini Digital Asset for fitting and draping clothing onto custom characters. Built to work across any character, the tool was tested in collaboration with artist Elina Kans — who provided feedback and helped push the designs with a banana hat and nuke suit.
☢️ Nuke Suit
Designed to look brand new — clean, fresh out of the box. A collaboration with Elina Kans.
🍌 Banana Hat & 👓 Glasses
🔧 The Tool
The HDA handles fitting and draping clothing to any character — proportions, attachment, and cloth behaviour all driven by parameters. The artist focuses on the design; the tool handles the technical fit.
- Character-agnostic: Works across different body types and proportions
- Parametric fit: Clothing adjusts to the character without manual retopology
- HDA packaging: Clean interface usable by non-technical artists
- Collaboration-tested: Refined through real design feedback with Elina Kans
🤖 Procedural Character Pipeline
Characters are built from a shared base — parts added or removed procedurally depending on the design. The rat zombie presented a specific challenge: it walks on its arms instead of legs, which meant the auto-rigger needed to be tricked with an unconventional bone naming convention. It worked. All characters expose parameters directly in the HDA so proportions and details can be dialled in without touching the underlying nodes.
- Base character system: One starting point, infinite variations through parameter control
- Auto-rigger workaround: Naming convention trick to handle non-standard locomotion
- Exposed parameters: Artists adjust proportions and details directly in Houdini
🔩 Development
Tooling
Early iterations building out the core system — vellum sim tests, hood fitting, and costume exploration. The first pass was about proving the cloth solver could handle arbitrary characters reliably before committing to the full HDA structure.
Weapons
The weapons were modelled using a modular silhouette-first approach — block out the shape, iterate on the design, then bring in surface detail. The machinegun went through multiple passes before the proportions felt right.
VFX for the weapons used a procedural texture system — different textures with varying shapes, strengths, and sizes flip between each other to create an organic, non-repeating feel. The same system was reused on the handgun by adjusting parameters.
Props
Decorative props designed to be worn as hats — the cupcake sits on the character’s head as a wearable accessory.
Interested in procedural clothing tools or character workflows? Let’s connect!