Explorations in Growth Simulation

[momposina]

I started using Houdini about 2 years ago, recently I have felt a desire to not only share but, hopefully to open up a discussion about the explorations undertaken in the work. The first post is therefore a look at how it began. 

The work started with an idea of looking into systems of growth and the procedural simulation of that growth. The question of landscape surveillance and 'fertility' arose - can a landscape (or object) topology be evaluated for growth? In this case the landscape would be a scanned model of a terrain, converted from pointcloud to mesh data and thus reinterpreted as a topology of points and primitives with certain inherent attributes: Position (vector), Normals (vector), and curvature (scalar) predominantly. The simulation can then search for 'flatness'  and eliminate areas of surface beyond a limit of acceptability. The surface is then displaced whilst maintaining ties to the remainder, this seemed to mirror a process not too dissimilar to inflation (although much more noisy and undefined), always using the retopologised mesh (and thus recalculated attributes) as a driver for the next frame of growth. The video and images below are examples of the earliest explorations (and failures) of this theme, first applied to a modelled object, with the video then moving onto a landscape:

https://vimeo.com/376861116

 

Edited December 2, 2019 by momposina
Just another quick edit

[momposina]

Here are a few more images of objects that underwent some sort of early 'growth logic' - I was primarily concerned with using the external mesh skin to grow both inwards to create an interior, and outwards to create perforations...