High Resolution 'Smoke' Reaction-Diffusion Displacement

I was very impressed with Cornus Ammonis' work on some new experimental Reaction-Diffusion formulae, one of them being this awesome one that generates fantastic turbulent 'fingers' that flow hypnotically as they self-organize.

To make this, in 'Ready' I wrote out a sequence at 4096x4096 pixels, and used it to displace (and texture) a grid in houdini. There is also some subsurface shading to make it appear a bit softer.

[johan_rosenberg]

Cool! reminds me of the surface of the Sun!

[DanWills]

Thanks Cornus! Your smoke formula is awesome! That's most of the reason this looks so cool I reckon :)

I used the 'c' reagent here (which you intended mainly for display purposes I believe) both as a displacement map, and to color the surface so that the peaks have a different color to the valleys.

I am intending to do a more complex setup that uses the a and b reagent values as a vector field, but for that I want to capture them in their floating-point glory using my houdini plugin. I've got it to compile against houdini 15 now (yay!), and I'm working out the details of getting it to build as part of the ready cmake. I hope that that will make it easier for people to play with.

[CornusAmmonis]

Astounding Dan! I'm curious, are you using the vector field as a normal map for this, or using some other means to get depth?