Hoppers

On Pixar’s Hoppers (2026), I was a technical lead on an internal vegetation authoring tool called “Blossom.”

Blossom is a Houdini plugin that leverages the procedural workflow and asset authoring capabilities of Houdini, while simultaneously abstracting some of the more technical aspects of the software. Its nodes are self-contained, a feature that enables users to author trees, plants and other assets with increased speed and ease.

Blossom is responsible for many of the beautiful trees and vegetation assets seen in the film.

Blossom Goals

We needed to design Blossom for users unfamiliar with Houdini. Its nodes and UI modules are designed to be fast, intuitive, and abstract Houdini’s complex operations running under the hood.

Additionally, the stylization of the vegetation in Hoppers was impossible to achieve with previous tools. Leveraging Houdini’s procedural workflow and plethora of geometry tools, we were able to quickly build new features for artists to achieve new looks.

Blossom User Experience

We built nodes for various operations such as modeling, deforming, adding leaves, and even editing trunk geometry in Maya.

Often times tools built in the middle of a production are ad-hoc and undocumented. This leads to technical debt and frustrated users down the road.

All of Blossom’s tools are documented, color coded, and have custom icons. I built a custom Houdini plugin that notifies the user which parameters are undocumented when they save a node, and provides a UI to quickly add new help descriptions.