Explorations in Vellum
A 2021 series of soft-body simulations exploring how simple material rules produce intricate, organic forms.
Explorations in Vellum began as a run of experiments in SideFX Houdini in August 2021. I was learning through play: pushing soft-body simulations until they produced forms that felt tactile, strange and almost ceramic, then rendering the results in Redshift. It was mostly an exploration of style. Repeated white forms, dark perforated surfaces and restrained colour, animated as short loops.
The experiments were shared in public as they developed. The first post on 13 August was simply “Playing with Vellum”; five days later I released the first three works on Hic et Nunc. The sequence grew into eight published pieces between 18 August and 3 September 2021. The complete record now lives in my Objkt archive.
From style to systems
Looking back, the series connects with the direction of my practice now: complex systems emerging from simple rules. A soft-body setup starts with a relatively small vocabulary of geometry, constraints, pressure, collision and forces, but their interactions can produce structures and motion that would be difficult to design directly.
That was not a formal thesis for this work at the time. These were playful visual studies, made by changing a few conditions and following the results that felt alive. But they mark an early, intuitive version of the question I now want to pursue more deliberately: how much complexity can a small set of rules contain?
The videos below bring together the first five published works and an early study from the process.