On this occasion, animation took a bit of a back seat (or rather, a Nifty seat), and I was instead tasked with modeling and rigging all the necessary assets to not only bring the city to life, but to have it change and react to the different weather conditions that we needed to showcase.

This meant using Houdini's procedural modeling to create a wide range of buildings for different city sectors (brilliantly mapped out by Zach), preparing several car models (including a truck with a raised platform), building a dynamic lightning and cable system and setting up a variety of trees that could react to wind, powered by Cinema 4D's moGraph tools.

That meant we could have hundreds of complex elements react to multiple changes in conditions using only a few keyframes, which allowed the team at Nifty to focus on timing and storytelling, instead of fighting the software over intricate details. Those were all taken care of.