Inspired by the Elementacular project, we’ve been working with the animation and illustration company Mediafarm to develop a similar procedural method for designing cellular and organic surfaces. The method uses hardware tessellation to displace an input surface in the normal direction. The displacement is specified using displacement curves combined with a number of “cell types” which define a certain look. Here’s a before-and-after shot of our cellular material:
Here’s another couple of examples, which show that we can apply our material to various shapes and are able to discard part of the output geometry based on a displacement threshold:
