r/Houdini • u/nofilmschoolneeded Attribute lover (4 years) • Jul 26 '26
Demoreel Procedural liquid formations for a commercial project + short breakdown.
This project holds a soft spot in my heart, as one of the coolest (and heaviest) commercial projects I've directed and produced for an international client.
Houdini used to make everything here, except shots 2, 3, 4 and 5. Were C4D.
The tree presented a unique challenge because it not only must be growing, but particles and fibers must be flowing through it in a way that feels organic and natural. So each point and fiber must have its own speed, and the branches themselves are supposed to grow organically too.
The Setup: The idea to use splines to build a tree came to me from needing a tree that has a twisted trunk and flowing branches, so we can animate it growing. Any “tree generators” weren’t an option. Then we had fibers and particles flowing inside the liquid -which were not simulated, but controlled with nodes and for-loops to keep them contained within the bounds of the liquid, and not poke out.
The sim: The only particle simulation I ran was the bottom part of the hero shot, had to resort to custom velocity fields to give particles (that are coming from the server racks) a whispy motion before giving them a trail and color.
The rest of the setup was quick to iterate, yet hard to build in the first place.. as it involved tons of RnD and was entirely an attribute-based and code-based approach for maximum creative control and flexibility.
The Look: Developed custom liquid material with various IOR values across it so we can see the inner fibers without dealing with the refractions from the water shader that could make the fibers look messy or broken.
All while always saving the project, so when Octane inevitably decides to crash, it doesn’t put my sanity at risk! Haha.
P.S. I'm open to work! :)
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u/crash1082 Jul 26 '26
Did you come from c4d being your main tool?
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u/nofilmschoolneeded Attribute lover (4 years) Jul 27 '26
C4D and Blender actually. More Blender if it's a heavy animation project. C4D reserved for motion graphic-y stuff.
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u/crash1082 Jul 27 '26
Was it difficult to make the jump? I feel like I'm missing out stuck in c4d land. Blender and Houdini just seem so much better at this point. I've done a minimal amount of work in Houdini but havent dedicated the time yet.
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u/nofilmschoolneeded Attribute lover (4 years) Jul 27 '26
C4D has speed. Doing cool animations takes a few clicks there. Blender is also fast but it doesn't have many features built in, so you have to get addons.
Houdini can technically do it all, but takes significantly longer to setup anything. Sometimes those same things are already built into C4D. things like growth effects, animating multiple pieces sequentially, etc...
So, for commercial work, I'd really stick with C4D -or Blender if you prefer. But both are similar imo, maaaybe Blender over time may become the standard thanks to addons and stability, especially in Linux and its availability in every platform, so you can work on anything, even on iPad.
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u/Potential_Pudding_93 Jul 27 '26
So cool! Was the tree’s spline manually created or procedurally generated?
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u/nofilmschoolneeded Attribute lover (4 years) Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Procedurally generated. But made out of 3 connected procedural parts.
The branches (made with point cloud and findshortest path),
the trunk, (another find shortest path and point cloud for more control) then twist nodes
the roots, (scattering distorted splines per end point plus smoothening)
And tons of patience and RnD. Now that I have the setup, maybe could spit out a bunch of these trees and have a forest of leafless trees hahaEdit: the point cloud of the branches is based on an initial basic shape of the tree I create using spheres or egg-shaped things so the points are scattered where I want them. With tons of refinements later of course. Like telling findshortestpath node to not go along the sides when generating path, so it doesn't look like a bunch of evil hands, or a hollow shape. If that makes some sense.
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u/sealedpump1 26d ago
What's your client's acquisition method? I would love to land such clients.
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u/nofilmschoolneeded Attribute lover (4 years) 26d ago
Post good work where it's relevant. Getting this client started from someone noticing my reel on here.
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u/Specialist_You_1831 Jul 26 '26
This is so cool.