Started with a Canon R10 five months ago and kept adding gear as I figured out what I enjoy shooting. I recently picked up an R5 as well. No regrets so far.
Included a few of my favorite photos.
The sim is just a quick pighead melt setup. The important part is the data transfer.
In Houdini, the melt attribute drives the viscosity / sim behavior.
Then I export the cache, import it in Blender, and use the same melt attribute in Cycles to mix between two shaders.
So it is not just animated geo. The sim state comes across as usable render/lookdev data.
Current features:
Houdini to Blender frame cache
JSON metadata + binary sidecar files for heavy arrays
point positions, UVs, and user-defined attributes
stable topology mode for fast position updates
changing topology mode for FLIP / VDB / remeshed sims
curve support
Blender shaders can read imported attributes.
I built the iris using three layered Vellum sims (outward, inward, and noisy mid layer) to generate the base fiber structure. Then I added post-processing with a pscale-driven push field, smoothing, and a radial constraint to keep the curves coherent and form arch-like shapes. It’s not a perfect match to the reference, but it gets close enough for the look I was after.