Extra Credits : Brad Husband (Lookdev), Tyrel Scott (Rigging), Dragon Model (Pre-built Asset), Jimmy Gill (Animation), Danilo Silveria (Director), Andre Chaves (Comp)
Featured at 80Lv website article : https://80.lv/articles/procedural-dragon-s-eye-created-in-houdini-redshift/
This is a dragon's eye Rnd/Lookdev I made for a recent job at Tendil Studio, that was not used in the final film. I also worked on the dragon's skin adding more detail and also the golden hints.
For the first time, I used an unusual workflow to create a realistic eye. I started by building a procedural iris system, but the resulting mesh was too heavy to animate smoothly. To solve this problem, I created a simple system in Houdini that baked the VDB iris into a depth map and reapplied it on the eye mesh as displacement. This worked well with the Redshift subsurface shader.
I also made another simple system in Houdini to generate the tiny veins on the lid and membrane.