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I’m in the process of creating a procedural eel generator! The aim of this small project is to get familiar with a more procedural way of simulating cloth and just getting more familiar with Houdini in general. Right now its very basic bare bones but I wanted to begin documenting.

Currently you can control the amount of eels and seaweed that spawn on the ground (which you can also control the terrain and the lenghtxwidth). They automatically are set up with basic animation and vellum simulation.

Some things I aim to add and fix:

  • Simulate the seaweed along with the eels (currently my computer cant handle too much geo so I’m setting up a low poly set up for the seaweed to simulate with the result of the cloth eel caches)

  • Fix the scattering so we can avoid seaweed crashing through the eels.

  • Add some more details to the eel models, right now I’m using basic tubes for the sake of setting up everything.

  • Add some custom procedural shaders.

  • Add some particle generation to scatter some bubbles on to add to the underwater look.

  • Yes, I will eventually clean up my messy graph!

The eels are inspired by garden eels! I want them to be a little more cartoony and floppy than real life garden eels.

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  • For now the eels are animated as a group after they get scattered to create the up and down bobbing motion, since in the garden eels still tend to look pretty in unison when moving. I’m using a bend deformer with some sin expressions.

  • I’m currently constraining the faces back to the anim by creating a Group of points using a sphere that gets scattered alongside the eels which I can use similar to the BB options in the group node, but allows me to choose specific areas per eels instead of the total volume of the group. Thanks to this I can get the eals to always have that bobbing up and down motion while allowing their bodies to slightly “drift”.

  • I tried some different configurations but ended up using the vellum balloon config because it just had a nicer bendy/fun motion I was looking for.

  • Weld constraint is referencing a Group were it selects all the open edges since the bottoms of the geometry are open.