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
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