See How You Can Create Flowers in Ice Using Houdini & Substance 3D Designer

Introduction 

Hello, I'm Maximilien Vert, a 3D Designer based in Paris, France. I discovered 3D about ten years ago, during my final year at the Fine Arts school. Although it wasn’t really taught there, I dove into it on my own time, mainly learning through YouTube tutorials, and I’ve been exploring and enjoying it ever since.

Early in my 3D journey, I became fascinated by the texturing process. I quickly realized how essential materials are to the final look of a project. That’s when I discovered the Substance 3D tools, like Substance 3D Painter and Substance 3D Designer. After graduating, I continued to experiment and soon fell in love with Substance 3D Designer in particular. I built a strong portfolio focused on material creation, and as a personal project, I created a procedural leaf generator in Substance 3D Designer. That project got some attention within the material creation community, and in 2019, I had the opportunity to join the Substance team.

Since then, I’ve contributed to the Substance 3D Assets Library, creating materials and assets for the community. I've also worked on additional visual content for marketing and communication purposes, like procedural food collection and procedural foliage assets.

Over the years, my interest gradually shifted toward animation. With my background in procedural workflows through Substance 3D Designer, I naturally gravitated toward Houdini. Since 2023, I’ve also started working as a freelance 3D Designer, focusing on procedural setups, animation, simulation, and look development. I’ve had the chance to collaborate with great studios, such as Six N. Five, contributing to their latest Cartier project and other in-house experimental work.

Flower of the Day

Since the beginning of my 3D journey, I’ve always been drawn to nature and vegetation. About a year ago, I started a personal project called “Fleur du jour” (which means “Flower of the Day” in French), where I experimented with 3D flower creation, designing flowers that could exist in real life, as well as more abstract or stylized ones, like plastic flowers.

This project led me to explore further. I was particularly inspired by the work of Joseph Horner, especially this piece, and also by the mood and aesthetic of a recent project from Zünc Studio for Skinceuticals. Drawing from those references, I wanted to create my own interpretation. I had also been wanting to explore ice cube shading for a while, so this project felt like the perfect opportunity to do just that.

Modeling

Everything in the project was created in Houdini, except for some textures that were made in Substance 3D Designer.

One of the strengths of Houdini is its ability to build custom node tools, called HDAs (Houdini Digital Assets). Since I’ve created a lot of flowers in the past, I developed an HDA that automatically generates a skeleton based on petal geometry, which can then be used for rigging. This gives a lot of control over the overall petal shape and motion. 

For the ice cube, the process was pretty straightforward. The key trick was using boolean operations to slice the geometry, creating interesting internal breakup and refraction effects. I also built a custom solver to generate internal air bubbles with more organic and varied shapes. I added some surface droplets in geometry, but most of the fine water details were handled on the texture side. 

I didn’t focus much on topology for this project. I started from a basic cube, unwrapped it, added edge detail using the amazing Labs Edge Damage tool, then reprojected the UV-mapped low-res mesh onto the detailed version.

Texturing

For the textures, I reused an animated falling drop texture that I had previously created in Substance 3D Designer for another project.

It simulates water drops sliding down as the ice cube melts. I also quickly crafted a roughness map in Substance 3D Designer. Combined with a normal map, these small imperfections make the refractions much more interesting by breaking the surface uniformity.

I added some small geometry droplets on the surface of the ice cube as well as a particle system to simulate falling droplets. These subtle additions really brought life and movement to the scene.

For the vapor, I used a simple Pyro solver setup in Houdini. It’s a powerful system – after some tweaking to get the shape I wanted, it worked perfectly. 

Lighting & Rendering

Refractive materials can be tricky to work with, as even the slightest change in lighting can drastically affect the result. A good starting point is placing a strong light behind the object (in this case, the ice cube) and then going through a lot of trial and error to find the right positions for the other area lights. For post-effects, nothing really fancy, just some contrast and curves.

Conclusion

In my opinion, appealing props come down to three main elements: material, lighting, and animation. The real challenge lies in making these three aspects work harmoniously together.

In this project, the main goal was to create a solid and believable ice cube, one that conveys both a sense of cold and the volume of the ice. It also turned out to be a great opportunity to explore smoke simulation and learn more about it.

Thanks for having me!

Maximilien Vert, Technical Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins