On a chill walk in the woods, I spotted this stick with an interesting lichen pattern. Tucked it in my pocket, brought it home, and...guess what happened?
From the get-go, I decided that Houdini would be the only tool i want to use for this project because of its ability to handle intricate and organic shapes. My goal was to see how far I could push it in terms of realism without sculpting or modeling the stick directly using Houdini's procedural approach.
I wanted to have a setup which makes it possible to give me an asset that suits any given purpose in a production from film to games which enables me to increase or decrease the level of complexity and to make design changes at any stage without starting from scratch.
What I ended up with is a node system that starts with a line. In several steps involving different techniques such as the VDB toolset, Vellum simulations or a solver, I was able to turn this initial shape into a stick-like form while still retaining an adaptable system.
For rendering I used Solaris and Karma XPU. A lot of time went into the development of the materials using Vex-shaders which I baked to texture maps using Mantra.
Here you can see some of the techniques that were used. For the lichen I came up with two different systems. On the left is the version I discarded for which I used a differential growth solver (thanks to Entagma!).
