Danny Laursen shows how to model and animate flowers blooming using Vellum and other techniques in Side FX Houdini.

If you need to animate a flower blooming in Houdini, you might think that Vellum would be a suitable avenue to facilitate that, and you’d be right. In this two-part series, Danny Laursen shows how to model, rig, and animate blooming flowers in Houdini.

In the first part, Danny Laursen covers creating procedural flower-blossoming animations in Houdini.

Laursen walks us 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,” Laursen says about the techniques presented.

In the following parts of this series, Laursen makes a phyllotaxis point generator to copy the petals onto, creates a system for blending multiple skeletons based on a growth attribute, creates procedural animation curves, and simulates the flower in Vellum.

More on Growing and Blooming Flowers in Houdini.

Also of note is this beginner’s style tutorial by Nick Medukha, which again works with Houdini’s Vellum solver to create a growing animation. The tutorial shows an easy and fast way to create an abstract flower animation that adds another to his growing list of “satisfying animations” created with Houdini. Visit that tutorial here.