For our Genie project we started by collaborating ideas on what parts each would be working, 'look & fell' of the character, references and an story board.
This first sprint I set up our unreal project in UE5.1 with the folder structure that each of us will be needing and a scene level for testing the camera and character animation. I changed the rendering project settings by setting lumen and removing motion blur to make faster working on the project since it was getting slow when responding to changes.
Started with the Genie's sword materialization in Houdini using a voronoi fracture with a distance from target node that drives the animation by using a lerp function for the appearing of it. For the movement of the pieces I use the normal information of the point and then add a displacement to their position to separate them with a attribute VOP.