First attempt to do some branching in Houdini. Nothing new really. There's a silent walk through of the main controls on Vimeo here. It's based on some of the concepts in Fabricio Chamon's brilliant Strand Tree ICE compound. It consists of a simple iterative paradigm where at each iteration n number of branches are generated and some kind of multiplier is worked into the length, width, angle etc. This multiplier can be attenuated by a 'reduction/increase' factor per iteration or by using a ramp. There are parameters to control the growth and colour with normalised attributes like distance, u etc and these are all left exposed. I hope the video makes it clear. The 'to do' list is massive - proper topologically correct junctions (without hacking it with Fuse or Polygons to VDB) would be great! The full .hip file is here. Any tips most welcome - interface or performance enhancements!
