I need some help recreating a pattern like the one in the attached reference using Geometry Nodes.
It resembles small dunes, flowing ridges, or wrinkled cloth. I need the pattern to be fully procedural and to follow the overall curved flow visible in the image.
The ridges should form curved, flowing shapes rather than straight parallel lines.
Some ridges should split into sharp bifurcations.
These junctions should remain sharp and defined, not become rounded or overly smoothed.
The pattern should feel coherent, as if all the smaller wrinkles are following the same flow field.
Ideally, I would like to control the direction, scale, spacing, and amount of branching.
I have experimented with stretched Noise and Voronoi textures, but I have not managed to reproduce both the curved flow and the sharp bifurcations.
Does anyone know a good procedural approach for building this in Geometry Nodes? A node setup, mathematical direction, or example file would be greatly appreciated.
I would probably start with a vector field rather than trying to get the whole effect from Noise or Voronoi.
For example, you could create a base curve flow using a few guide curves, resample them, and use their tangent/direction to influence the position of the smaller ridges. Then add controlled distortion along the flow so the ridges bend and separate naturally.
For the bifurcations, I would avoid heavy smoothing after the split. Creating the branches first and then converting the curves to the final mesh should help keep the junctions sharper.
You could expose parameters for the main flow direction, ridge spacing, noise strength, and branching probability. This should give you much more control than simply stretching a Noise texture.
Interesting suggestion, but I haven’t managed to make it work yet.
The Gabor Texture is still relatively new in Blender, so I often forget to include it when testing different approaches. I experimented with it, including combining multiple Gabor textures, but I’m still not getting close enough to the reference—especially the curved flow and sharp bifurcations.
Do you have any suggestions for how you would set up or combine the Gabor textures to achieve this result?
I’m not very familiar with flow fields yet—I only discovered the subject recently. I’ve tried a few different approaches, but I still haven’t been able to achieve this kind of result.
Could you give me a few more pointers on how you would approach it? Even a basic explanation of how you would build the field and use it to guide the ridges would be very helpful.
Yea after thinking about it some more, the pattern clearly shows correlation between different wave scales, and that’s not something you’re going to get easily with any noise. @Agha_Jan 's idea involving curves seemed good… you could scatter some curves first, deform them according to a simple low frequency noise… then displace the surface according to the spline factor… the middle mapped to 1, to form a peak of sorts… and both ends mapped to 0, diving back down into the surface. I guess for the smaller waves you could maybe spawn several smaller curves along the length of the bigger one, the trick then is to figure out how to shape them, while still keeping that flow going.
