Bloom

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Programs used: Houdini

Responsible for: All Aspects

Model

Inspired by the kinetic scultputres of Casey Curran

Process

Box and Leaves sketches. Drawn based on a video of the flower in motion. I originally planned to shape the handle into “U” shapes and have the wires connecting to the leaves be driven by this motion.

Work in progress - figuring out how to calculate the angles for each line of the ladders. I originally thought that I had to have overlapping dot products like the middle image, but after talking to professor Fowler I approached the problem differently and got it to work.

These are the main drawings I referenced to name and number points:

Technical Guide

Petal

Single petal sculpted in this node
Started with a box then used edit and extrude nodes to get the right shape.
Material is applied to the petals here

Leaf

Major and minor parts of the leaf were created with curve and revolve nodes.
Minor leaves were copied to the points of the curve that creates the major leaf
The leaves are textured inside of the BoxandLeaves node

Point Ref

Using dot product to calculate the angles and animation of the main structure of the flower.
Tubes are the “lines” creating the structure of the flower. Points are placed on these lines stored in an add node at the top of this network. This add node is referenced in the main FLOWER node to retrieve these points to create more complex geometry.
There are two Stationary network boxes, deleting one or the other ruins the reference points, so they are both kept for now.
Point wrangle used to calculate and retrieve angles of the dot product.
Naming conventions of lines are based on sketches.

Flower

This node creates the main structure of the flower.
The colorful network boxes are creating parts of the geometry. Null nodes are used inside these networks to “export” the geometry to object nodes in the dark gray boxes. The dark gray boxes are where everything comes together.
The white box is copying one of the sides of the flower around the center.
Before and After copying to points:

RefPoints are referenced in the dark pink node at the top of this network.
Lime Green → used to create latter shape
Any nodes with the same dark pink color reference the RefPoints node.
Red nodes signify the application of a material

Left network boxes

Dark Purple → Center Torus Geo
Creates the geometry of the center most circular structure inside the flower
Light purple → Intersection analysis animation
Center network boxes
Pink → Spiral Petal Attach
Small piece of geo that connects to a spiral and later has a petal attached to it
Referenced in Yellow, mid blue, mid green, and light pink networks below it
Yellow, mid blue, mid green, light pink → geometry attaching two “latters” (see lime green network)

Right network boxes

Mid Purple → Top hook geo
Light Blue → Bottom Attach to stem
Magenta → Petal Geo brought in and copied to specific points created by geo in the Central networks
Lime Green → Creates the geo for the Ladders or cage of the flower.
Dark Blue → Mid Attaches latter to the central most torus (see dark purple network)

Box and Leaves

Creates the wooden box, handle, and leaf animation
Red, Blue, Yellow → Creates the geometry and intersection analysis animation for the leaves on the Left
Orange, Green, Purple → Creates the geometry and intersection analysis animation for the leaves on the Right
Gray Purple → box geometry.
Light green / magenta → Creating the corner lines of the box, referenced in the gray purple network
To keep the network clean, each colorful network is completed with a null node that is referenced in the dark gray network boxes through an object merge and put together.

Challenges

In the beginning I struggled with making the dot product animation work. I found the best method was to use a point wrangle node and reference the angles in transform nodes.
For the top of the flower there are two lines that move relative to each other, Line N Line M. This could have been one side of a dot product triangle along with Line I, but I wanted to follow the reference as closely as possible.
To solve this I created another point wrangle node for just these lines. I changed the references in x0,y0 and x1,y1 to be specific towards Line N and M. (see main PointRef node)
The leaf animation was originally going to be driven by a different handle shape, but that rotated the lines in the wrong axis, so I opted to creating more intersection analysis cylinders.

References

Casey Curran

Website: https://www.caseycurran.com/
Bequeath These Seeds: https://www.caseycurran.com/new-gallery-3
32 Point Flower: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bel-kgQHtDd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
32 Point Flower video: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bel96r2n3Yz/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Deborah R. Fowler website

SideFX forums

Youtube

Houdini Lattice Deformer by Pixel Fondue
Houdini Bend Node by Pixel Fondue
How to Create Edge Loops by Inside the Mind
Sidefx Houdini 17 organic modeling workflow test by Werner Zeimerink