Vellum Grains with Crowds
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The Vellum Grains Stream video ended up being way too long and I found this out the hard way during the editing process. So the Vellum Grains Part 1 Live Stream video is not split into 3 parts for the HQ heavily edited version with my fancy blue highlights and blue arrows, and easy to find bookmarks (hopefully the bookmarks will help you find the topic without watching the entire video over).
Breakdown for Vellum Grains Part 1
Live Stream
The Vellum Grains scene I was working on got a lot larger than I anticipated as I kept on adding more stuff to it. I added a Sand Castle Tower for the Crowd Bug Agents to crawl towards as a goal point in the scene. The Sand Castle made the scene very large and wasn’t something I could cover in one Live Stream. I decided to split this topic into 2 parts for 2 separate Live Streams.
Part 1: Vellum Grains Basics & Preps the Scene for the Sand Castle
In Part 1 of the Live Stream, I demonstrate the basics of Vellum Grains, attraction weight, and Crowd Agent setup. Originally I planned to go over Clustering Vellum Constraints, but I ran out of time. So the Clustering will be saved for Part 2.
Part 2: Vellum Grains Dynamically Activating the Grains
*** Coming soon! I’ll schedule a Live Stream for Part 2 soon!
Vellum Grains Attractionweight
Attraction Weight
The Attractionweight in Houdini’s Vellum Grains allows the Grain particles to naturally stick its nearby counterparts. This creates an awesome look and feel for sticky Grains or sticky particles.
Vellum Grains Constraint Clusters
Vellum Constraints for Grains
We take that stickiness concept and take it a bit further by lumping or clustering the Grains together into random groups. This will create small and large pieces of grains that are stuck to each other very tightly. When the Grains break off, it’ll break off into pieces.
Houdini’s Vellum Grains SIM rendered in Blender’s Cycles
Blender Cycles
I took the whole scene and exported it out to Blender, in order to render it out using the Cycles rendering engine.
Houdini Vellum Grains SIM Flipbook Animation
Flipbook Animation
I also did a flipbook animation in Houdini for this same scene. This is one of the reasons why I love the Flipbook feature in Houdini, it’s SO fast! Sadly it takes a lot of effort to get nice shaders on the viewport so Flipbook animation can’t be used for anything production worthy. But there is plenty of potential for concepting, especially if you’re in discussions with a client and need confirmation on the project.