Te Ōtukapuarangi, or the Pink and White Terraces, were a pair of silica terraces in New Zealand until they were destroyed by a volcanic eruption.

I had a couple of artistic goal coming into this project. This first is that I hoped to be able to make the water in the pools feel light and clear while still feeling tinted, and that the terraces felt like they each were flowing as one unit.

The modelling of the terraces was actually a somewhat interesting process. I started by blocking out the overall form in Blender. I brought that blockout into Houdini, and grouped the cylinders by height: then basically extracted and smoothed out the silhouette of those groups and extruded them to make the tiers.

I then brought them into Blender to dig out the initial shape of the basins (this could have been done in Houdini as well, but I wasn’t expecting to iterate on the shape of the terraces much), then brought them back into Houdini again, smoothed them out a little more, converted them into heightfields, then used simulated erosion to add in the details.

This gives it those nice grooves you can see in the final model, and the walls thinned by erosion look extra light and delicate.

To make the water feel clear yet tinted, I simply set it up so that while the water shader was colored cyan, it would still be mostly transparent, then during the texturing stage, I added a cyan overlay to the bottom of the basins.