Impressive Custom Sand Dune Tool Made with Houdini
Check out the setup by Luis Mathison, an artist at Frame48.
Have a look at this mind-blowing sand visualization by Luis Mathison, a CG Generalist specializing in FX and look development at Frame48. The post above, made in collaboration with the official SideFX account, showcases the capabilities of the tool.
The setup was brought to life using a custom sand dune tool in Houdini, crafted by the artist. His VEX heightsolver tool simulates wind-driven sand transport and its interaction with terrain, creating sand dune patterns that range from highly realistic to entirely abstract.
"Sand dunes have been an obsession of mine since my earliest days in 3D. After realizing the usual noise-and-blur tricks weren’t cutting it, I built a minimal aeolian dune solver in VEX to simulate wind, avalanching, and sediment flow directly on height-fields," the artist says.
Houdini is capable of producing impressive, almost magical-looking simulations. For example, check out the implementation of optical flow in Houdini's Copernicus nodes by 3D artist Jakob Bock, creating an environment with the House Gen HDA inside Unreal by 3D Artist Hugo Beyer, and fluffy wool and Kintsugi-style ceramics by 3D Artist Max Schwugier, also known as Maxwellbundy:
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