animating words

summary

Simple curves known as Bézier curves were shown to be a type of fractal in a journal paper, which means that these curves are made up of multiple smaller versions of themselves. Since cursive words are just collections of curves, we can transform one word into another by breaking up each word into a set of simple curves and then smoothly transforming one word's curves into the other word's curves. However, instead of directly transforming one word's curves into the other word's curves, I decided to transform the fractals represented by each word's curves into each other, resulting in a rather surprising animation where one word is broken up into an intricate collection of shapes, which transform back into another word.

To generate the stylized animation at the top, I implemented a new digital asset in Houdini that computes the fractal transformation between the curves making up each word, pruned overly dense point collections, copied a small box to each remaining point, and applied a color distribution across the boxes. The integration of this work into Houdini was done as part of Professor Doug James' CS348C course at Stanford University.