"BOB" - Houdini Creature Simulation Breakdown

For my latest school VFX project at Breda University of Applied Sciences, I took a deep dive into Houdini vellum simulations, specifically how to simulate soft body creatures.

I first tracked the plate using SynthEyes, and then recreated the hallway scene geometry using Blender. Since the main focus of my project was on the simulations, I did not want to spend too much time on the creature design. This is why I took a procedural approach, generating the mesh and UVs in Houdini. Afterwards I textured my creature using Substance Painter. This is the first creature I ever made, and I am quite proud of how he turned out.

I named him Bob.

I used vellum tetrahedal softbodies to simulate the creature using various custom constraint setups. I applied Houdini's wrinkle deformer to the mesh afterwards to get some extra wrinkle detail. I used a viscous FLIP simulation to add slime to the scene, and also generated a wetmap for the creature and slime.

After rendering it all out using Karma XPU I brought everything together in compositing using Nuke.

Big shoutout to ‪@ghost3dee‬ , whose work this was inspired by. His creature simulation course also taught me a lot about how to approach this project.