Underwater

Personal project creating a walking ‘animation’ of an octopus on the sandy sea floor using vellum in Houdini. First iteration tried to use a base animation in kinefx as a guide for the vellum sim but it was very chaotic and hard to control. Instead I created a procedurally animated attribute that ran down each tentacle at an offset to each other to control a force in the solver. The force direction was sampled from a user drawn curve, additionally there were other attributes, masks and forces on the tentacles to curl the tips of the tentacles, to create a motion to move the tentacle up and down as well as making the tip ‘feel out’ the surrounding area of the ocean floor.

To simulate the underwater fluid behaviour, using the animated octopus, a smoke solver was used to create the velocity field of a fluid simulation. This would be used to advect the points in the sand sim, the sand volume as well as the floating particles.

Sand and sand volume was done with POP grains and the pyro solver respectively. I procedurally modelled five variations of sand grains each with a different shape and shader, which were then point instanced in Houdini Solaris over the POP simulation. Sand volume was a simple smoke setup using the past velocity field to advect the smoke. Lighting and rendering done in Solaris and Karma.

Responsible for all (Vellum, POP grains, Pyro) except octopus and scene models.

Octopus model belongs to: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/art/realistic-octopus

Scene models and texture belong to: https://polyhaven.com/a/coast_rocks_05