Waypoints

This project looks decepitevly simple on the surface, but utilizes LOPs TOPs ROPs SOPs and COPs - a true Houdini soup! Starting in LOPs, I broke out each layer of the planet into it’s own context option and used a TOPs scheduler to run each of the layers for each frame, resulting in 63 renders for those 7 icon variants above. I also had several versions of the Earth setup with a manual switch depending on what I was working on. Inside the SOP create, I have my Layered Earth HDA, which allows me to control the height, resolution, and layer count separately for the land and the sea. Here you can see inside the HDA and the land and sea loop streams converging at the bottom. I trace a COP network output, wrap the resulting curves onto a sphere, and use that to boolean the sphere so I can keep that perfect sphere topology, extruding out layer by layer.