Vans "Checkered Future" Commercial - Houdini | Breakdown
I recently had the honor to create a small teaser to Vans's upcoming Immersive Installation titled Checkered Future: Frequency Manifest held in Milan, Italy.
The commercial took a week to execute, from concept to final realization.
Process
Vans provided us with three different concepts for the teaser. We chose the one that made the most sense for the campaign—something visually striking, challenging enough to be exciting, and still feasible to execute within a week.
The core idea was simple: ripples. But instead of traditional circular ripples, they needed to follow a checkered pattern.
I started with a UV’d grid and began layering ripple solvers along with Perlin and Worley noise to introduce texture and complexity.
To integrate the Vans logo, I used a trace node to cut it out and then extruded the shape. Rather than running a full simulation—which would’ve been time-consuming—I opted for a more efficient approach. Using an attribute transfer, I soft-transformed the logo directly on the grid by extruding areas marked in red.
The noise and ripple solvers amplitude and pulse duration were animated to sound using a CHOPs network.
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