Member Berries Falling into a Bowl

In this project my goal was to have some sort of smaller fruits falling onto the table and into a bowl.

At first, I wanted to use grapes but then I decided to use the infamous 'member berries' from South Park. 

I found a nice asset to use on Quixel Bridge. To get the colors right I had to change the hue and saturation of the albedo texture map. I found it necessary to tweak the colors in DaVinci Resolve as well, which would have been nearly impossible, had I not rendered out the cryptomatte passes as well. However, I kept looking at references, it was a rather difficult job to make sure the colors match as much as possible, since the references were (obviously) not from real life footage.

Main steps of the process:

The simulation was made in Houdini, rendered using Redshift, and composited in DaVinci Resolve.

Simulation:

Since the simulated objects are berries, I found it more convincing to use a soft body sim, instead of a rigid body simulation. Nevertheless, I aimed to create somewhat rigid berries, since I wanted the softness of the berries to be quite subtle. Having tried out different stiffness values, I ended up finding the one closest to what I imagined.

Disclaimer:

All of the assets and texture maps used in the project were downloaded from Quixel Bridge.