SERPENTS explores the smooth, satin-like nature of playing cards and the winding movements of serpents & snakes.
This project involved exploring procedural animation techniques and simulations in Houdini to bring the snakes and cards to life.
We tried to keep the setups as minimal as possible using animated and carved curves & vellum. Lots of love was spent on creating the cascading scale animation since the scales needed to be aligned with the mesh, overlap and follow the motion while having varying sizes across the surface.
Serpents explores the smooth, satin-like nature of playing cards.
Although playing cards feel smooth, their micro-textures allow players to shuffle them with ease and perform card tricks with precision. In the shuffle animations, we aimed to capture the gliding movement of snakes. The surface resembles snakeskin: dry and satin-like with a subtle directional texture that provides controlled resistance when moving in one direction.
3D motion design, visualizations, animation, simulation, music videos, VFX, visual experiments.