As part of a Houdini outsourcing team while studying in Breda University. I was tasked with making a tool that makes and places special looking rock formations based on concept art made by one of my fellow students.
For starters I needed to make a system that allows me to make rocks of variable sized while still keeping its UV and Vertex Painting. So the system that I decided to use was to cut the model in sections and make system that just copies those sections where it is need.(Demonstrated in the GIF below)
After the basic rocks were done I had to take care of the clustering. At the beginning I had what you see in the GIF below. However this was a bit too random and was not fitting the concept as much as it should have.
So instead of that I made it a bit more controllable and fitting to the concept by making the rocks in the center always be taller and have the once around it be a smaller size.
After the clustering was done I need to find a way of bending the mesh based on a curve. At first I tried using the bend modifier and some other things but in the end I ended up using wire capture and wire deform. Based on what I read in this post.https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/21000/
After a talk with the team, I decided to go for my other approach which was using one model and placing it in such way that it looks like the concept. By doing it this way I could literally instance every single rock and have an interesting approach to do doing the placement. Which I did (you can see the final…ish result in the video below) but am not going to show my approach because I want to keep some of my secrets.
Sadly this tool ended up not being used since the concept of the game the team made changed and these rocks were no longer needed. I still think this was an awesome learning experience that made me learn more useful things I can apply to future projects.