XMEN Map Pin-table Concept
I went through a phase of watching all the old xmen movies recently, classics! One thing that did strike me was how absolutely awesome the 3d map pin table was. Does anyone remember it? Take a look below.
I love that kind of pulse reveal, and it turns out there is a pretty interesting blog on how they did it originally (https://beforesandafters.com/2020/07/14/remember-that-pin-table-map-from-x-men/). Its a really great read on a two decade old workflow, but I wanted to see if it was possible to recreate that effect using some of the workflows I create my maps in.
Enter Houdini - the one stop shop for any vfx work with geometry! It was fairly easy to recreate the effect, a mixture of textured noise and gridded city assets made the effect possible.
The first effect I tried it with was a pan of Manhattan, similar to the original with a ping on a point of interest.
That worked pretty nicely, so I decided to port one of my race-maps (https://www.behance.net/gallery/136827075/Race-Mapping), the Dragons Back race, into the map table. I really loved the end output, I need to get back to creating some more of these!
