Feather Boa Siphonophore
(Erenna richardi)
Procedural Organic Modeling in Houdini 20.5
Matt Padovano, Houdini Artist
Matt Padovano is a 3D artist specializing in Houdini, VFX, and procedural design. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he developed a strong foundation in visual effects, motion graphics, and 3D modeling.
During his internship at Houdini.School, he contributed to creative projects, refining his skills in procedural animation and simulation. His portfolio highlights his expertise in industry-standard tools, showcasing innovative work in animation, modeling, and digital design. With a passion for pushing creative boundaries, Matt is emerging as a promising talent in the VFX industry.
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The Project
For my project, I wanted to showcase my ability in procedural organic modeling, and as someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the ocean, my mind immediately was drawn to the feather boa siphonophore (Erenna richardi) as the best way to showcase both my and Houdini’s core strengths.
When it comes to design, I believe that the best inspiration comes from the world around us. The ocean has always been close to my heart, and the beauty of its creatures and seascapes inspire me daily.
Siphonophores are a group of deep-sea marine animals in the class Hydrozoa, closely related to jellyfish and corals. Despite appearing as a single organism, they are colonial creatures composed of specialized individual organisms called zooids, which function as a cohesive unit. These zooids are highly specialized for roles like feeding, reproduction, or locomotion. These creatures come in a massive variety in appearance, but their modular nature lends themselves extremely well to the procedural, node-based workflow that Houdini offers.
When I began to work on the project, I stumbled across a major issue - the amount of small thread-like tentacles of the organism was far too great, and they had to move along with the main body, which itself has to move organically. Layering simulations at the density and number of constraints that the project entailed led to my biggest obstacle, being processing power.
To solve this, I switched over to a hair and grooming workflow, and in order to maintain the dense number of hairs that gave the creature its signature ‘feather boa’ look, I used the Hair Clump geo node to apply an attribute that I could access and manipulate in order to create guide curves. With these guide curves, I can simulate the bulk of the hairs by dividing them into sectioned clumps, and deforming each curve based on its guide. This method reduced the number of primitives I needed to simulate from over 17,000 to only 225. After that, it came down to ensuring that the deformations were applied correctly to each clump without any clipping or fusing of their geometry, which was fairly straightforward.
Storyboard
The far angle opening shot. A custom particle system was used to create the atmospheric floating particles that made the deep sea scene look more convincing. A strong light source creates a lovely shadow that really emphasizes the creature’s curled form.
Multiple angles and lights were used in order to emphasize the curves and how the light interacts differently with the transparent bell material. Getting the look dev just right for this project was difficult, as the lighting has to interact with the surfaces in very unique ways.
A close-up shot of the longer trailing tentacles. These smaller tentacles were excellent in adding some bright points of focus when the lighting hit them at the right angle to reveal themselves.
Breakdown
The full geometry before textures and materials were applied. For the frontal bell’s movement, I used a custom VEX script to deform each siphon based on a sine wave. For some elements, I made use of the Measure SOP’s convexity and concavity attributes to give a certain look to their respective materials
The 225 guide curves highlighted in yellow used to simulate each full clump based on their clumpid attribute, totalling over 17,000 primitives in all.
The Chain SOP was used on the longer tentacles to get proper spacing and orientation on the smaller spheres. This gave each tentacle some much needed differentiation from both each other and the bell.
Conclusion
GridMarkets made the process of simulation, caching, and rendering incredibly easy straight from Houdini.
The essentially seamless inclusion of their digital assets at multiple levels allowed a lot of necessary flexibility from a multi-faceted project that required a lot of iteration, and gave me time to work even closer on the project and fine tune it while other simulations were caching on GridMarkets’ end.
As someone who has other jobs, constantly watching over my machine was far from practical, and I could rest easy knowing that I could easily access GridMarkets’ powerful resources at the touch of a button. Being able to work while simulation and rendering were occurring didn’t just save me time, but let me relax knowing I could rely on something so easy and useful while not sacrificing quality.
When I had any issue, the GridMarkets team was immediately on the case. Their prompt responses and curated, quality feedback for my own questions was extraordinary, and I left our interactions knowing that if I had an additional problem, I could always get the right answer in no time at all.
In essence, this project would not have been possible without GridMarkets’ quality service, which made my high-quality renders and simulations easier than ever.
By: GridMarkets marketing