Take a look at this fascinating animation of growing plants made by Effects Artist Jonathan Formosa, known on Reddit as jonno_formosa, in Houdini. It is the artist's personal project, inspired by Studio Ghibli.
The plant growth effect was created with Houdini. The artist started with plant assets from Megascans, then built the procedural rig by scattering some points and using Find Shortest Path, and converted it to a rig with the KineFX toolkit. After using rig wrangles, the creator drove the rig based on the orientation of each joint and used a mask along the distance attribute created by Find Shortest Path. Then, the artist exported the plant animations as alembics, scattered them to points, and used the setprimintrinsic within a wrangle to drive the animation.
Jonathan Formosa suggests watching this video to better understand the plant animation:
