Sand Lightning
Viewport render
A view from the side, with the sand grain count reduced, showing how the sand structure works. The depression under the ball is cut procedurally into the sculpted sand, then granules are instanced onto it
A more zoomed out view
"in the asteroid belt" of the sand. A few random granules get an iron pyrite shader instead of the black rock, and a smaller subset of those get a white quartz shader instead
The sand processor. Raycasting is used to find the orb and push down the sand sculpt underneath it. Then points are scattered across it, and a series of granules are copied in
Generator graph for the lightning arc and swirling particles
Been trying to focus on doing more smaller scale abstract projects, where I can focus more on the parts of CG that are actually fun to do for me. Anyway, back to elemental orbs, I love me a good elemental orb. The sand effect here was a ton of fun to nail down, I ended up generating about two dozen different granules in Houdini, sculpting the overall shape of the sand in Nomad, the sending that back to Blender to instance the granules onto the sculpt (and cut an orb hole)