Timemore is a brand that I encountered when I started my coffee journey. I like the clean and industrial form embedded in Timemore's design. I borrowed motifs like contrast lighting and motion blur to highlight the modern, minimal, precise, and tactile quality I get from the product. The distinguishing feature of this grinder is its foldable handle. Hence, I decided to recreate that in Houdini by creating a rigged version. Unfortunately, though the rig worked, it wasn't polished to the level that I think is presentable. But I still shared the process and result of the rigging below for anyone interested.
All process are made in Houdini - modeling and rigging.
Here's the following Rig setup:
A lower poly proxy is created for sim. Joints are made between:
lid and the body (Conetwist)
horizontal level and vertical lever (Conetwist)
The moving part which snap into place when the handle is unfold (Spring Constraint)
An initial velocity and angular velocity are given to the whole geo for the sim. Lastly, the transformation from the proxy is transferred onto the final Higher Res version.
Challenges
The challenge of this setup is I couldn't get the conetwist constraint to behave properly using the RBD configure setup. I had to turn to the older ways of manually creating joints and contraints (adding point and line) and creating the setup in the dop net. Another challenge is that given the scale of the object (small), using pure convex decomposition still creates geometries going through other geometries, especially when moving.
