I'm trying to teach myself more about procedural textures/materials. whilst there are quite a few good tutorials out there which help with subjects such as rocks, I'm having less luck with generating noise that looks like ‘sticks’, ie. isolated lines in random orientations.
This would form the basis of straw, grass, dirt and similar procedural debris materials.
Any tutorials or pointers from others? Best idea I've got so far is based on worley noise but I'm not sure how to shape it.

Attached an image which I'm aspiring to recreate in Houdini.

PS. I know about geometry and fur procedural methods for grass - but I'm looking for a procedural material here for learning purposes.

Thanks all!

You might get away with the boxes pattern and a distorted uv space.
Put the whole thing inside a loop and do variations with each iteration.
The shadows are faked with a blurred and offset version of the pattern and stack with each layer.
This whole thing is a bit of a hack though and that loop with 150 steps is far from ideal, but you get the idea :wink:
The rest is just layered noises.

Hello,

Very interesting and nice result, thx a lot.

Great trickery and, yes, fun

Thanks for sharing!

That works quite well actually - thanks blackpixel! Gives me an excuse to learn more uses for loops too!