MultiCube v038 Personal practice to solidify my understanding of Houdini's duplication techniques. I wanted a variety of cubes, each doing their own thing with random animation offsets, and the whole clip had to be loopable. This required a fair amount of VEX in Houdini, in particular due to the fact that as many of the cubes are dynamically carved by subtractive booleans, their point count changed which in turn badly affected motion blur. And as one cube's animation is finished, it is replaced by a different cube with a different animation and different point count. This means the output of the copy_to_points node is a single mesh with highly unstable point IDs. I therefore had to create a system before and after the copy_to_points node to provide stable point IDs from which to calculate the correct velocities for the motion blur. Very brain-tickling but very satisfying when it finally all worked. In the process I also had the idea to light up the interior of some of these cubes and initially I did it naively, with some emitting materials. This however resulted in grainy/noisy output that gave me the excuse to learn how to use a light mesh instead, resulting in smooth lighting and faster rendering times. This work was inspired by the series of (2D) Cube Icon Sets realized by "vecktor" and published on shutterstock. I initially wanted to do an animated version staying faithful to the original but it is not possible to contact the author via shutterstock to ask for permissions and I couldn't find him anywhere else on the internet. Also asking a shutterstock representative to clarify if I could legally create derivative work was not fruitful: the line between derivative and original work is not really sharp and I could not obtain a straight answer. As such, I took vecktor's work for inspiration but ultimately did my own visual brainstorming about what cubes to create and followed those sketches instead.