Procedural Flesh Bridge
For one of our Houdini assignments, we were tasked with creating a procedural asset.
Since I found growth animations to be satisfying and wanted to explore more organic modelling, I decided to take inspiration from the game Scorn and create a procedural flesh bridge.
While the end result could definitely use some improvements, especially with the spine and texturing, I think it turned out decent enough.
I feel like I only scratched the surface of what's possible in Houdini, and I am more than interested in finding out what I can do more.
Procedural Flesh Bridge Turntable
Options for the bridge
Resample input curve and create attribute for middle. This attribute will be used later for the growth.
Create a volume of points and transfer middle attribute.
Using the middle attribute, blast the points near the middle depending on a variable. Animating this value will create a growth animation.
Convert points to VDB and then to polygons.
Using find shortest path, create veins that goes through the point volume from earlier. To create more interesting shapes, I made use of path cost to create zones to avoid.
Using carve, these veins can be animated along with the flesh growth.
Created shape for the spine.
Spine pieces gets placed along the initial resampled curve.
Everything added together.