Now coming back with another fun experiment, this time procedural centipedes, i have to confess these ones are a little hard to watch, i feel a bit uncomfortable.

Similarly with the sentinels, i had to use some trails and make a curve out of them to deform the centipedes, but this time the trails are not made with the trajectory of particles, because i needed to make the body collide with the other centipedes, so this time a similar setup of the tentacles was used, several pieces joined together with some hard constraints, then the head will have a random movement and the other pieces will try to follow the piece above the chain.
​
Then i take a distance value to feed the motion of the legs, those are controlled with an ik that uses a clamped sin equation for vertical movement and a sort of "zig zag" equation for horizontal movement.
And finally i use the path deform to deform the centipedes with the curves from the rbd simulation.

​Now here remembering some old nice tech exercises but now with the powerful Houdini.

3-Step Tentacle with full procedural movement and geometry.

First step, the tentacle movement made with only points, a vex wrangler was used for that using some neat sin equations.

Second step, the geometry of the tentacle was made using segments that can be copied several times, then they are merged and the thickness is changed along the axis with a ramp.

Third and final step, the vex path deform (vimeo.com/247656989) was used to deform the tentacle geo along the tentacle curve that was created using the points of the first step.

Hip File to Download:
tentacle_001.hip

If you want to know more about how i design tools, i am using a similar process used in "System Development Life Cycle" which is the process used for software development, at the end of the day doing stuff in Houdini is the same as programming, but with nodes and scripting.

So before i even open Houdini i write a document with the requirements and design of the tool. Then after that i make the implementation in Houdini. I have found that is the fastest and most organized way to develop tools because you are not wondering around in the middle of the process in Houdini to know what to do next, because everything is already planned from the beginning. If something big need to be changed in the middle of the implementation or afterwards it's better to go back to the design document and make the change there.

Here is the Requirements & Design document for the tentacle tool:
tentacle_requirements_design.pdf

Here a wikipedia link with some info about "System Development Life Cycle":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_development_life_cycle