Holiday Butter Cookie Pt. I

Hello everyone! I wanted to share a recent project that combines a bit of holiday cheer with some shader experiments. With the holidays around the corner, I found myself thinking about cookies a lot – but not just baking them, also creating them digitally using Houdini 20.

I decided to experiment with Superformula, a powerful HDA by Bogdan Lazar, to model some unique cookie shapes. It turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable process, offering a new way to channel my festive spirit into procedural modeling and shading.

The next step was to give these cookies a lifelike appearance, and this is where the AMD Material X library in Houdini 20 came into play. I selected a shader that resembled cookie texture, then tweaked it until it captured the essence of a real cookie. This was my first foray back into digitally creating food items after about 8 years, and it felt great to revisit this challenge.

I rendered the final product using Arnold on a Mac M1 Ultra. The outcome is a digitally crafted cookie that blends my interest in shader experimentation with a touch of holiday fun. It's been an interesting project, merging experimenting with Solaris and Arnold along with USD material networks, and I'm eager to share it with you.

I hope this inspires you to mix your hobbies with your work! #Houdini #Houdini20 #Arnold #Solaris #USD #gobo #Superformula #MaterialX

You can probably already seen from this screenshot that I wasn’t ready to post the sprinkles and the piping. I was working on the fly and I realized I could either break it or do the piping or both. Pt 2 …lends itself to more shader and potentially RBD experimentation.