Procedural Log
Volume I
Volume I
This project is a collective of experiments using procedural systems to test and improve technical knowledge while resulting in interesting and dynamic visuals. For this volume, I used Blender's Geometry Nodes as the main tool for the creation of these systems, as well as Davinci Resolve and After Effects for compositing.
As a tryout, I created a scattering setup driven by a cloth-simulated mesh. It was a simple exercise that provided a better overview of how this new mode would integrate with other parts of Blender (like the shader editor).
The wing setup was a challenging one, the core concept for its creation is the use of curves and melding its attributes to edit or mask its shape. At first, it only started as a single feather with lots of experimentation and distortion, but as the project moved on I was curious to see how scalable it could get. After many versions, the result is what we see above.
With this iteration, I created an editable asset that if shared with another artist, they can draw the lines representative of the stems, and the plant will spawn accordingly with growth controls.
Using node-based systems is often compared to visual scripting, which means the artist has the opportunity to mix and transform data in ways that aren't as catered to or provided by the DCC's own tools. The example above shows an example of that, where we can transfer attributes to other properties (rotation in this case), creating a different visual result.
For this last iteration, the focus was to create interesting surface detail with recursive subdivision driven by a seed value. The seed would iterate the operation providing different results. Chaining this operation multiple times helped create micro detail in a non-patterned way, having similar results to greebling.