I was fortunate enough to work under one of my all-time favorite artists, Jenson Leonard, on his “Workflow” installation at Pioneer Works.

Together, we developed a pipeline that would work efficiently to implement his performance onto the character: a stylized Michael Jackson mask. This involved generating blendshapes using Nvidia’s audio2face platform and pairing them with performance capture recorded on iPhone. I then used CHOPs and a custom jiggle solver inside of Houdini to add secondary and cycled motion to the face and head. Houdini’s grooming tools and vellum were used to simulate the hair.