Painted Dunes

This project explores the creative overlap between Houdini’s Flow Solver and Vellum Grain simulations. The setup shows how to use flow fields not only to drive motion but also as a creativetexturing tool. On top of this, it demonstrates how to build custom procedural area light textures inside Copernicus and use them in Solaris and Karma for a streamlined lighting and shading workflow. The scene also covers practical techniques for bringing low-resolution grain simulations into a higher fidelity result, making it easy to iterate quicker and then upres for final rendering. Altogether, the project highlights a complete workflow from simulation to lookdev, showing how fluid-driven systems can extend beyond motion into lighting and material design.

This project requires SideFX Labs