Houdini Tutorial | Blooming Flowers | Model, Rig, and Animate | Part 2
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In the first part, we went over procedural modeling for a single petal, procedural rigging, and how to animate and deform a single petal.
In this part two of the Houdini flower tutorial series, we will create a phyllotaxis point distribution setup and run a growth attribute through it.
After that, the orientations need to be right to get the flower looking like a flower. This will be done with some per-point matrix transformations.
That growth attribute drives a skeleton blend, blending between a flower bud pose and a bloomed flower pose.
At the end, we will go through how to bone deform a single petal onto a flower full of petals.
In the following parts of this series, we will go over preparing the setup for simulation in Vellum, doing some post-sim tweaks, and creating materials and rendering in Karma and Solaris. At some point after that, we will break down a photo reference of a flower and create an animation based on that.
These methods are a mix of things I have seen from John Kunz on Patreon, Entagma, and some things I figured out together with Simon Reher.
Resources:
Mark Fancher // 01 - MAPPED TRANSITION - MFX Modules for Houdini
Flower Garden | Carl Krause | Paris HIVE 2023
Flower Projects | Paul Esteves | MucHUG
My KineFX notes on Notion:
My VEX notes on Notion:
Feel free to ask any questions or leave feedback in the comments. Would be happy to see any flowers people create.
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Chapters:
00:00 - Overview of Lesson
00:29 - 1. Phyllotaxis
02:57 - Phyllotaxis Parameters
04:36 - 2. Growth Attribute
06:00 - 3. Orientations
06:45 - Visualizing the VEX
07:08 - Rotating in Y
07:55 - Rotating in Z
08:30 - Improving Parameters
09:00 - 4. Scale
09:48 - 5. Skeleton Blend by Attribute
11:46 - 6. Petal Deformation in For-Loop
13:50 - Attribute Copy
14:25 - Compiling the For-Loop