Project Type:
MFA Student Work

Focus:
Foliage Agents, Procedural Enviroment

Software Used:
Houdini, Nuke

Date:
Spring 2026

Description:
WORK IN PROGRESS.

Test scene for agent based foliage scattering.

Foliage Agents
This project stemmed from trying to get deforming instances in Solaris. I processed a few graswald assets to gave them rigs and converted them into agents.

Deforming Crowd Instances

After scattering the agents I extracted the scattered skeletons and deformed their IK handles with noise. This then gave all the agents a unique deformation that follows the wind like pattern of the noise. At the cost of having to realize all the skeletons as real geometry.

Getting the deformed skeletons back into the agents was a huge pain, here is wrangle ended up using to do it.

Hieghtfields and Instances

I built out the rest of the scene using heightfields and standard instanced foliage.