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Mushroom Disintegration
Responsible for all aspects.
Software: Houdini
Inspired by Joja Villareal’s video of mushroom sporing, this project takes the strong backlighting, and the motion of the mushroom sporing in Villareal’s beautiful video but adds a level of fantasy with a disintegration effect. The disintegration effect utilizes a pyro source spread node to define the area of disintegration and then a POP network for the spore clouds.
The reference can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbYofGaQbs.
Process
General Node Network Organization
Mushroom Geometry
The mushroom cap and stem are created procedurally using primitive shapes, boolean operations, and copy to points node for placement on the stem. Tapering the mushroom cap and adding random bumps with a mountain node gives the mushroom a more organic appearance. The stem uses a line and skinned circles. Using a line made placing the mushroom cap more efficient as there is only one endpoint for positioning, whereas tube geometry would require extra processing to get a central endpoint.
Mushroom Positioning
With the geometry created, the mushrooms are bent and positioned manually to give finite control over the placement and resulting shot framing.
Ground and Moss Creation
The ground plane is a simple grid manipulated with a VOP network to add noise and variation to the geometry. Moss is scattered over the ground plane using a scatter and copy to points method, with randomization built into the copying through VEX code on pscale and orientation driven by normal direction.
Log Geometry
The log geometry is a simple cylinder with the end capped and cut with a boolean to create an organic edge. A free wood bark texture map from 3dtextures.me is used to texture the log.
Log Bark Displacement
Displacement using VOP networks enhances the log by adding physical bark texture to the model.
Disintegration Sourcing
The disintegration effect uses a pyro source spread node to identify points deletion and for the particle effects’ source. Deleting the points caused errors with the subsurface scattering on the mushroom geometry, so geometry planes were extruded and re-meshed to create a solid geometry block. Due to the inaccuracy of the re-meshing, the original mesh was booleaned using the new mesh to prevent any jittering between the source and disintegrated geometry. There are a few frames of weird geometry on the large mushroom due to the boolean processes. A switch node turns off the geometry as necessary to avoid issues with particle sourcing.
Mushroom Simulation Setup
