Atrophy is a 3D animated music video created as my second master’s project in the Realtime Art & Visual Effects program at the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg. The track was composed by our student colleagues Sebastian Julius Jungwirth, also known as Julius Jung, and David Kronawitter, also known as Frederik Heimlich, who developed and refined the music alongside the production.
Each core team member had a dedicated area of responsibility. I worked as the art director and was responsible for shaping the overall visual direction of the project. This included creating moodboards for color, lighting, model quality, editing and atmosphere, as well as writing a detailed style guide to help keep the visual language consistent across the team. I also created the storyboard and edited the final video together with Ahmed Joldić.
Gregor Jakob acted as producer and kept the team organized throughout the production. Michael Jungmeier was responsible for the story, developing several script versions and turning the team’s ideas into a coherent narrative. Thomas Markus Schmidt was the technical lead, focusing on effects, simulations and procedural workflows.
In addition to our shared responsibilities, each team member created their own shots from start to finish. All shots shown here were created by me, while the mold growth itself was based on an HDA developed by Thomas Markus Schmidt. My shots were built entirely in Houdini 21. I initially experimented with Redshift, but later switched to Karma XPU to improve performance and adapt the rendering workflow under the time constraints of the project.
This project was especially valuable for developing my lighting skills. It pushed me to approach lighting much more deliberately and had a strong impact on the quality of my later scenes. I also gained experience working with MetaHumans in Houdini, improving their look for a VFX context, and became much faster and more confident in look development, rendering and shot finalization.
Stylistically, Atrophy was quite far outside of my comfort zone. The project leans more toward realism, which is a direction my team was very interested in, and I wanted to take that seriously while still bringing in my own visual sensibility. It became a good challenge in balancing my team’s strengths with my role as art director, and in taking a visual risk instead of staying only within styles I already knew well.
Tools: Houdini 21, Karma XPU, Redshift, MetaHuman, After Effects
