Deviant.

Overview

This was an assignment for Andreas Cattucci, a lecturer at FH Salzburg working at Panoply in London. The brief was open: find something you are curious about — an art piece, a style, a tool you want to build — and make a project from it.

As I enjoy short animations paired with music, a music video was the obvious answer. But beyond the visuals, I wanted to tackle workflow efficiency: specifically, the tedious loop of importing characters from Mixamo, reassigning textures, and normalising naming conventions every single time.

So alongside the video, I built the Mixamo Importer — a PDG-driven tool that pre-processes a library of Mixamo characters: rebaking textures, standardising bone and mesh names, and making every character instantly swap-compatible with any Mixamo animation. Adding an animated figure to a scene went from a chore to a single click.

Police Siren

Houdini · KarmaXPU

Abstract Pillow Shot

Houdini · KarmaXPU

Final Shot

Houdini · Compositing

Police Entrance

Houdini · KarmaXPU

Officer POV

Houdini · Compositing

Visor Shatter

Houdini · VFX

Process

The process followed a pattern familiar from many of my projects: I start intending to build a couple of tools, and it naturally evolves into a full production. Here that meant two Houdini tools — a JMG Placement tool for COPs and a Mixamo Importer — which then fed directly into the final video, making character animation significantly faster.

A Houdini Digital Asset for quickly generating abstract displacement patterns — useful for Sci-Fi structures and surface detail. Features integrated displacement and emission controls.

This tool accesses a pre-converted library of Mixamo models. Because Mixamo assets ship with messy material setups, converting them live would be painful — so the library was processed once via PDG: textures rebaked, meshes renamed, skeletons unified. Any Mixamo animation now drops onto any character in the library without extra work.

Learnings

Key technical skills built across the video and tooling work.

Music

I found the track The Lighthouse by Out of Flux on Artlist and instantly had visuals in my head. Full credit to Out of Flux for this one — available on all major streaming platforms.