Felix Joleanes

Hi, thanks vusta, i'm glad you found it useful.

Here i come again with a new experiment.



I am trying a different approach for making little nasty creatures, this time using the FEM system of houdini for Soft Bodies.

The approach is basically to use the restP attribute which controls the “default” position of the solid object, so that the mesh will try to keep it's initial shape, but that value could be animated and updated inside the sim using a sop solver. That restP attribute can be defined by vertex so that it can be transformed using the pivot of the tetrahedrons, so a “local transform” per each tetrahedron could be achieved, in this case contracting or expanding.

Then the rest is up to the FEM sim.

HIP file of one Slug with some comments inside:
joleanes.com/uploads/3/0/6/8/30680865/slug_001.hip

A few videos i used for reference:
youtube.com/watch?v=nUbETibPwBo
vimeo.com/81994340

Now coming back with another fun experiment, this time procedural centipedes, i have to confess these ones are a little hard to watch, i feel a bit uncomfortable.

Similarly with the sentinels, i had to use some trails and make a curve out of them to deform the centipedes, but this time the trails are not made with the trajectory of particles, because i needed to make the body collide with the other centipedes, so this time a similar setup of the tentacles was used, several pieces joined together with some hard constraints, then the head will have a random movement and the other pieces will try to follow the piece above the chain.

Then i take a distance value to feed the motion of the legs, those are controlled with an ik that uses a clamped sin equation for vertical movement and a sort of “zig zag” equation for horizontal movement.

And finally i use the path deform to deform the centipedes with the curves from the rbd simulation.

Then again doing some tech experiments for fun this time with the sentinels.

First Step: doing the tentacles animations using some sin equations. and attaching them all to the sentinel head.

Second Step: doing some particle animations following a curve using the pop curve force operator, then some trails were created.

Third step: the trails were used to control the deformation several sentinels, one for each trail, i used again the path deform that i did in vex.

There is still some collisions between the sentinels that have to be done, maybe the next time.