Making a big ball o’ worms

One of my favourite setups for Earlybird was the big ball of worms being delivered by drone (the future of internet shopping).

My solution for this one has three main parts:

• a big squidgy central ball (a softbody sim) - this fills out space to minimise the amount of worms to sim and render, we only need to sim the worms we see.

• the worms (a wire sim, like simulating lots of pieces of string) - these are pinned to the central ball, either by their middles or their ends for variety. To make them wriggle, I added a random, frequently changing velocity to each worm. Some of the worms fall by breaking their connection to the ball.

• finally the net holding the worms in, another wire sim, anchored to the positions of the animated drones.

Thanks to Houdini’s Vellum toolset, all these sims coexist and interact with each other.