Dot Generator

[medieval_cortex]

This is my first project with Houdini that feel like my own as I haven't used a specific tutorial to make it happen.

It's basically a tool that scatter dots alongside curves to get a cool noisy hand drawn style. This image was made from hand drawn curves in Houdini:

 

The nice thing about it is that the curves can easily be animated with a P attribute randomize, which give this result:

 

Of course you can also feed images or videos with a Trace node. I got this result from an image by animating the threshold value of the node:

 

Coming back to the first image, here is how the curves look like in the Draw Curve node for one of the tree:

 

Then I created a grid and painted a density attribute alongside the middle:

 

Then I sweep the grid alongside the curves, as you can see (in white) the density attributes is passed along:

 

Then I scatter points based on that density attribute, so the majority of them are toward the center of the branches:

Then I remap the density attribute to basically invert it's value and rename it to pscale. Finally I copy to points circles (actual geometry), and thanks to that pscale value the circles furthest from the curves tend to be bigger which I find give the best look:

Some final notes:
- I actually have 3 scatter system with 3 different grid size, this give more control over the end result and make the inherent CGI-ness of the scattering less obvious.
- I've exported all the objects in the first image as alembic and did my render in Blender where I feel more at ease to do my layout.
- Even though I think it look better in 2D, this effect can totally be done in 3D with this setup, here is how a squab look like in the viewport:

 

Let me know what you think, critics are more than welcome, if someone has done something similar (and most likely a lot better!) I'd love to see it.

dot_generator.hiplc

Edited September 1, 2020 by human_robot

[Librarian]

Love it !
If you can explain How you do ? Particles or ? What drive those colors ? just some process ....maybe some File example

[medieval_cortex]

31 minutes ago, Librarian said:

Love it !
If you can explain How you do ? Particles or ? What drive those colors ? just some process ....maybe some File example

Thank you! It's funny I was looking at your work 5 minutes ago, great stuff!

Actually I wanted to upload the file but forgot... I've added it to my post!

dot_generator.hiplc

Edited September 1, 2020 by human_robot