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Hollow
A pumpkin-carving toy built in Rive for the Rive Halloween Challenge: shave, gouge and saw into a pumpkin with real wall thickness, then light the tea light inside and see what you actually carved.
You get one pumpkin, a saw and a candle. Every face is carved by hand, and every slip stays in the flesh.
Rive is the tool people reach for when they want a button that bounces or a mascot that blinks. It also turns out to have a scripting language, a GPU canvas you can write your own shaders for, and data binding. So when the Rive Halloween Challenge came round at the start of October, I wanted to find out how far you can push it before it stops being an animation tool and starts being a small game engine. Hollow was the first answer, started on 4 October. Three more followed within the week, which says more about my inability to pick one idea than about Rive.
Hollow is a pumpkin-carving toy. The pumpkin comes already hollowed out (I spared everyone the seeds), and you work on the outside with three tools from the table: a flat blade that shaves off thin layers, a gouge that cuts rounded channels, and a little saw that goes right through the wall.
The cuts are real
That’s the whole point. The model keeps track of how thick the wall is everywhere, so a shallow shave lets a faint glow through once the candle is lit and a deep one lets through a lot more. Saw a closed outline and the plug drops out and lands on the table while you’re still holding the saw. Go too close to an edge and the thin lip tears. Each tool throws its own debris as well: curled peels off the blade, wet chips out of the gouge.
The pumpkin itself is a Blender model, turned live inside Rive, and the cottage around it is a Blender render baked into the backdrop. Everything you carve is drawn on the fly. Light the tea light and it glows through every opening and throws shafts of light into the room; blow it out and the smoke finds the highest cut first. The carving sounds are recordings of real pumpkins being carved.
No two pumpkins
Every new pumpkin grows its own ribs, lumps, blemishes and stalk from one of four shapes: round, squat, tall and large.
Not every step was forward
For a while, cutting a big enough hole made the pumpkin grow walls that weren’t there: the cut edges of a big opening stayed standing long after the pumpkin around them had gone.
The other three
Hollow is one of my four entries for the Rive Halloween Challenge on Contra. The others are Séance, a talking board that answers back, Knock Knock, a peephole you shouldn’t trust, and The Fogged Mirror, a bathroom mirror you shouldn’t clean.
