Engraved
I found a video online of a timelapse of a CNC engraving and thought I could recreate it in 3D.
The basic steps for doing this involved a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Houdini. I created all the text in Illustrator and imported it as paths to Houdini where I could control the length of the curves. This enabled me to have the text be dynamically drawn onto the cube shape with a combination of extruded text curves and boolean operators.
I converted this geometry into a VDB and then back into a polygon to clean up the edges of the resultant shape. I did try an approach using displacement maps but I found the renderer struggled with the sharp edges I wanted to create so I stuck with the high poly version.
I modelled a drill and using the leading point of the text curves was able to dynamically animate it to follow the curve exactly.
A simple particle simulation from the same point with a bit of variation on the initial velocity gave me the subtle dust effect I was after.
I used quite a lot of DoF in the final render to give a good sense of scale and created a little conveyor belt and CNC table to give the whole shot an “assembly line” feel.
I’m going to revisit this project and use some RBD to get the drill to cut away the large shape of the C3ESCAPE as it didn’t look quite right with the particle sim, I really want you to be able to see big chunks of “plaster” flying off!
As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!