CGCircuit - Regrowth - Growing Plants in Houdini
https://www.cgcircuit.com/tutorial/regrowth---growing-plants-in-houdini
- Bring your digital environments to life with Regrowth – Growing Plants in Houdini, a hands-on training experience designed to teach you how to create beautiful, believable plant growth effects using Houdini’s powerful procedural toolset. Whether you’re crafting shots for film, motion design, games, or personal projects, this course walks you through a production-ready workflow for animating organic growth from the ground up.
- In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a flexible plant system that grows, branches, curls, and blooms over time. The focus isn’t just on making something that looks cool—it’s about understanding why it works. You’ll explore core Houdini concepts such as procedural modeling, attribute-driven animation, and node-based workflows, then connect them into a cohesive setup you can reuse and customize for different plant types and styles. By the end, you’ll have a solid framework for creating everything from delicate vines and flowers to more complex, hero-quality growth shots.
- The course is structured step by step, starting with the fundamentals of setting up growth paths and controls, then moving into more advanced techniques for shaping, timing, and art-directing the animation. You’ll see how to introduce natural variation, avoid repetitive patterns, and keep your setups flexible so you can iterate quickly. The workflow is built with real-world production in mind, helping you balance procedural control with creative freedom.
- Regrowth also covers presentation, so your results don’t just work technically—they look great on screen. You’ll learn how to prepare your assets for rendering, refine the visual quality of your plants, and create clean, appealing growth animations suitable for showreels, client work, or cinematic shots. The techniques demonstrated are broadly applicable and can be adapted to many different styles and pipelines.
- Perfect for intermediate Houdini users looking to level up their procedural skills, Regrowth – Growing Plants in Houdini gives you a practical, artist-friendly approach to one of the most visually striking effects in CG: organic growth. If you’ve ever wanted to make plants that feel alive, this is your blueprint.
