This Coral Growth Simulation Looks Beautiful & Mesmerizing

The FX Artist Iman Vafaei shared on LinkedIn an impressive Houdini coral growth simulation that is very hypnotizing. The video shows the coral growing rapidly, causing bubbles in the water and stirring the sand.

The artist explained that it was created using a SOP solver driven by different masks to control the growth. For the sand, he used a Vellum Grain simulation. He also mentioned that the shading was made with MaterialX and the rendering with Karma XPU.

In the comments, Vafaei explained that he aimed to create random and non-uniform shapes that could go from a micro to macro scale, and that it was important for him to have different parameters to control the shapes, growth patterns, and timing.

The artist also said in the replies that the sand was made using 60 million instanced points, built from 10 different types of beach sand to add more detail to the scene.

Vafaei shared a video on YouTube showing how the mesh growth was based on curvature, direction, and shadow masks.

You can check out other projects by Iman Vafaei, like the balloon character interacting with rain or the car explosion test that he made for a movie VFX shot.