For this theme Cells getting affected by the virus were also needed, as the patient is in a hospital and is on his deathbed. This cell is going to be copied multiple times in the animation so that is why I had to keep it low poly and less dense when compared to high poly models.
Hence for this concept i took a sphere as the base upon which all the other stems would setup upon.
Followed by this I created the steams and buttons in Maya. For the stem, I took into consideration the same technique by which I created the Fountain in the Musical box project. I drew a curve that would resemble an outline of a mushroom-type figure. After that, I revolved around this curve which resulted in me getting this desired result.
After this steam was created, I exported it into an FBX object so that I could import it into Houdini for further processing. Instancing objects onto points and particles is really good in the software of Houdini. It is much more reliable and we also have much more control over all the settings which we would want.
To begin I imported the steam cell in Houdini. While doing this, I also scattered points onto the surface of a sphere with the help of a sphere node. Along with this, I gave it a noise pattern so that I get the ‘unevenness’ of the points on which we have to instance the steam. After giving these points, I gave normals to the points so that all the steam pointed outward of the circle. Normals play a crucial role in making this happen, or else the stem would be pointing in any random direction. And after this, I copied the geometry onto the points with the help of copy to points node and went to the final step of texturing.
For texturing, I have used the principle shader that is available in Houdini. Principle shader in Houdini has the same physics and same techniques of that as Lambert in Maya. Both are very similar to each other. Hence, I gave it a basic red color which depicts the cell, and a white color to a few stems which depicts that the cell is affected by the virus.