Houdini Tutorial | Blooming Flowers | Model, Rig, and Animate | Part 1

Support on Patreon: Download HIP file for free: This is the first part in a tutorial series that will go through creating procedural flower blossoming animations in Houdini. In this part, we go through some basics of procedural modeling and KineFX to create a single flower petal with a rig that allows the user to shape and animate between a “bud pose“ and a “bloom pose“. I attempted to keep this relatively beginner friendly, and if you treat the VEX wrangles as black boxes, everything else should be easy enough to follow. In the next parts of this series, we will make a phyllotaxis point generator to copy the petals onto, create a system for blending multiple skeletons based on a growth attribute, create procedural animation curves, and simulate the flower in Vellum. At some point throughout the series, we’ll talk about using this procedural setup to model a flower and its growth animation based on photo reference. At the end of it all, we will make flower materials, light, and render the flower animation through Solaris using Karma. These methods are a mix of things I have seen from John Kunz on Patreon, Entagma, and some things I figured out together with Simon Reher. Some interesting resources to explore this topic further: Flower Garden | Carl Krause | Paris HIVE 2023 Flower Projects | Paul Esteves | MucHUG My KineFX notes on Notion: Feel free to ask any questions or leave feedback in the comments. Would be happy to see any flowers people create. Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 00:29 - Overview of Part One 00:50 - Part One - Petal Shape 04:55 - Part Two - Petal Skeleton (KineFX) 06:00 - Skeleton Orientations 07:55 - Note on Fusing the Skeleton 08:12 - Rig Doctor 08:42 - UV Deform Skeleton to Petal 11:03 - Capture Skin Weights 11:46 - Part Three - Deformation and Animation 13:38 - Skeleton Blend 14:24 - Petal Animation Instagram - Behance - Artstation -