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Yes, it was done in Houdini. Yes, it was pretty much that. I used the velocity of the ball as the direction vector to calculate where the next plate will be. There are other controls built in - I can tweak the angle of the plate, and it will adapt correctly for either side. The proceduralism also extends to the audio processing. I can process the waveform to pick out the peaks and send that to the dynamics solver as the frames on which the plates should appear. I was also in the process of adding in the "horizontal" mode. This is something that I can keyframe on/off and determines whether the next plate is flat or if it is angled at the ball. I just ran out of time building it, and decided to hit render instead. Here is a preview of that: houdini_kNhVUmnUzI.mp4 I honestly don't know if it does. Dynamics is actually one of my weakest areas in Houdini. Thanks for the suggestions. From the above clip, you can see that I'm actually only using a single plate that I move around during the simulation. That keeps things extremely light in the solver, and what I do after-the-fact is use that audio peak data that I had stored earlier to extract the plate from each frame that it appears inside the solver (this is also automated - Houdini has an excellent feature to extract any geometry from any frame that you specify, and I just run a loop over all the frames that have the audio peaks on them). The material emission is also automated. I can generate a mask from the point of contact and use that to drive the emission value on the shader, no keyframing needed.

Good one. Houdini uses Bullet Dynamics which is the same as that still available in Cinema. I stopped trying to use the new unified dynamics in Cinema because it was a nightmare and nothing really worked as expected, and lots of stuff seemed just flat out broken, but as soon as I tried it with the old and reliable Bullet Dynamics it was pretty easy and straightforward and the controls seemed to control things as you would expect. I think you could do the dynamic elements of this animation in either Houdini or Cinema without major differences, but the shading elements would be much easier in Houdini. Working with Cinema sadly forces you to use a separate material for each element, or some other sadistic workaround, instead of just simply changing object or object point colors in Houdini in response to any chosen stimulus. Also, I found no direct way to get an object's direction vector in Cinema and had to build a rig to determine that instead. Also I may have overlooked something but I could find no way to get collision data from dynamics inside of Xpresso, so that would have to be eyeballed or timed out as well. Below is a test I did a few days ago to determine how well I could control the decent rate of the marbles, with one marble hitting quarter notes (180 bmp) and the other hitting eighth notes (360 bmp). In the end I now feel convinced that all these animations you see on Tik-Tok and the like, and in the past, are not using dynamics at all except to get the initial accelerations and velocities that the different curves and circumstances produce. Dynamics is way too variable and unpredictable and hard to control compared to a simple and predictable align to spline animation where the velocities and accelerations are built into the curves, or even a sequence of offset motion clips.

thank you all you realy helped me alot i found the soultion by using object group in object manger and double click on object group icon and start to put my nodes in there it will be direct in my objects so i can put a material @Cerberathis tutorial helped me alot thank you