While researching plants I thought of a plant I used to play with as a kid while at school. I did some research and found it was called a jewel weed. I played with them because sometimes when you touch them they explode. I thought it would be fun to have this really explode with a pyro sim, that coupled with the seed pods interesting material, I thought this would be a very interesting project.
The First thing I went about doing was a test of pyro, to make sure I could make it collide with objects. The Pyro sim was very simple just a pyro explosion and a static solver interacting with it via a merge. I then exported it as VDB sequence with a density and heat field. I use an arnold volume and volume shader to teak the look of the sim.
I then went about modelling the seed pod. I kept it low poly and made sure to take into account at render time smoothing and subdividing. I then started on the shader and found that a combination of refraction and subsurface was what was working best, i’m still in the process of refining this but the material attributes are in the images below. The displacement is driven by 2 simplex noises, one fractal for general roughness, and one rigid for distinct wrinkles. Both noises were stretched around the model and with some remaping and clamping I found some very good results.
Although I think the biggest breakthrough was using the randomwalk attribute in the subsurface scattering. I think that is what really made it feel like the light was penetrating thought it. The issue is that this can increase render time and with such a complex scene optimizing renders will be a constant battle.
randomwalk off
randomwalk on
