This project was initially motivated by my remembering a talk that I watched from Simon Holmedal on the techniques he and his team used for a few projects in Houdini. One of the ideas he mentioned made use of voronoi-fractured pieces as frames for other shapes. While the rest of the project went in a completely different direction, I wanted to explore the forms themselves.
I made a system that allows me to create a seamlessly looping animation where every part of the scene can be randomized. By changing the seed, the geometric shapes, camera path, and particles are all randomized to a different (but still seamless) animation.
Here's the main network for the scene. Most of the added complexity was dealing with edgecases that could come up. I ended up creating a setup that analyzed every small piece in the scene and identified if it got within a defined distance of the camera path. This allowed me to have pieces randomly floating by the camera without them ever intersecting.
All of the piece movement and rotation is defined by a looping noise HDA that I made a while back (it's just a wrapper for a standard noise SOP with some extra time parameters).
