Dragons Eye in Houdini

This is the R&D and lookdev of a dragon's eye I made for a job; it didn't make it into the final film. I used an unusual workflow to get a realistic eye: converting heavy VDB geometry into displacement maps.

I started by building a procedural iris system, but the mesh was too heavy to rig and animate in the time we had. To solve it, I made a simple Houdini setup that baked the VDB iris into a depth map and applied it back on the eye mesh as displacement. It worked well with Redshift's subsurface shader. I also made another small Houdini setup to generate the tiny veins on the lid and membrane.