Grandpa Vampire Slayer

Overview

An 8-second concept art piece for a stop-motion short film about a grandpa who slays vampires. In this scene, the grandpa carves a wooden log into a stake — his weapon of choice. The full story would explore the origins of the grandpa and how he came to take on this unlikely calling.

The Stop-Motion Look

The style is stop-motion, heavily inspired by the Netflix show The House. The grandpa character is made of felt material, giving him that handcrafted tactile quality. To sell the stop-motion feel, all animation is on 3s using a Blender addon, so movement has that characteristic stepped, handmade cadence rather than smooth interpolation. The body animation was driven by mocap data from Rokoko, layered onto the rig to keep the motion grounded and natural even at the stepped frame rate.

Blender + Houdini Pipeline

The project is split across two packages:

• Blender — Scene layout, grandpa character, felt material shading, lighting, and final rendering. Mocap data layered onto the character rig for natural body movement.
• Houdini — Wood chip shavings that curl off the log as the knife strikes. RBD simulation with Bullet solver, exported as Alembic (.abc) and brought back into Blender for final rendering.

Houdini RBD Wood Chip Simulation

The knife strikes the log three times, and each strike needed its own set of shavings that activate at the right moment. The shavings are procedurally shaped — curled strips extruded to paper-thin thickness — and driven by Bullet rigid body dynamics. A visual trick blends each shaving from a flat-on-the-wood position to its curled shape as it peels off, so they look like they're actually being carved from the surface. The full sim was cached and exported via Alembic for the Blender render pass.

Techniques & Nodes