Basalt Generator - Houdini

A short timelapse of my technique of generating basalt columns using a hair system! its a fairly robust technique that allows you to comb the strands and cut out specific areas that dont work. I also very briefly show the distance from geometry node that can be useful for grabbing an attribute and multiplying it with the length to allow you to grow basalt against walls, etc.

This is a simplified version of the one I built last year, theres a lot extra you could add into this.

A few things to note which can help with some issues at the base when some of the small columns get some rotation issues, this can happen at the groom guide process, so I would try and be careful when combing those areas. you could try to straighten them out manually. I used the cull threshold on the length within the guide process. This allowed me to cull out the very thin pieces.

EDIT::

Adding a quick extra step to allow upresing and adding breakup to the columns by converting the geo into a VDB and running noise patterns through vdb reshapes (dilates and erodes). This could be useful to set up Mid range and Hero assets and get them ready for a proper sculpt. For further away geo I would leave it with the basic geo and let the shader do the work.