Summary
POPs can feel complicated. Even after learning the fundamentals, working with attributes often feels disconnected from your ultimate goal: making great visual content. The gap between “understanding POPs” and “building something beautiful” can seem enormous—and without applied practice, many developers stay stuck in tutorial-land.
In this 3-hour 15-minute workshop, Vassilis Malamas bridges that gap by guiding you through the creation of a complete, real-time underwater environment—entirely from scratch using procedural geometry and GPU-accelerated particle systems all built with POPs. You’ll build dynamic ocean sand with caustics, sculpted rocks with sea life growing from their surfaces, swaying seagrass, pseudo-flocking fish, rising bubbles, and volumetric light rays. Every element is generated procedurally and runs in real-time, demonstrating how the attribute-driven techniques from POPs scale into cohesive, visually rich scenes.
Instructor
Vassilis Malamas, morphē
Course Contents
- Setting Up the 3D World: Establish the foundational scene structure—camera, lighting, and spatial logic—that will house your procedural environment. This framework ensures every subsequent element integrates seamlessly into a unified composition.
- The Seafloor & Underwater Lighting: Build dynamic ocean sand using POPs and attribute manipulation using Noise TOP layers. Then layer caustic light patterns and volumetric god rays using TOP and Light COMP techniques that allow you to project textures as lights. Together, these create the atmospheric foundation that defines the underwater mood.
- Sculpted Rock Formations: Generate procedural rocks using different POP shape generators, noise-based deformation through Lookup Tex POPs, Twist POPs, various texture mapping techniques. You’ll learn to create infinite organic variations from a single system while maintaining artistic control over form and placement.
- Populating Surfaces with Life: Create simple limpets-like geometry using Line POP and Revolve POP that you can then copy, scatter, and correctly orient on the sculpted rock surfaces, while also creating sea urchin-like geometry and distributing them across the ocean bed. These distribution techniques create contextually aware placement that feels organic rather than randomly sprayed and allows the geometry to be correctly oriented to match the environment.
- Organic Motion Systems: Create swaying seagrass, rising bubbles with randomized drift, and pseudo-flocking fish with emergent group behaviour all from scratch with POPs. You’ll use Particle POP, Random POP, Noise POP, Transform POP, Math Mix POP, Pattern POP, Copy POP, and more to create both the geometries and produce natural motion from simple attribute-driven rules.
- Capstone: Complete Underwater Environment: Integrate all elements into a fully realized, GPU-accelerated scene running in real-time. This final assembly demonstrates how modular procedural systems combine into production-ready environments for installations, live visuals, or rendered content. You’ll gain insight into common post processing techniques that turn boring 3D renders into cohesive feeling environments.
Course Benefits
- From Fundamentals to Finished Work: Close the gap between understanding POPs and actually building with them. You’ll leave with proof that attribute-driven workflows translate directly into polished visual output.
- Procedural Environment Design: Learn to think in systems rather than objects. Every element you build is infinitely variable, allowing rapid iteration and easy adaptation to new projects.
- GPU-Accelerated Real-Time Performance: Everything runs live. These aren’t pre-rendered tricks and nothing is pre-built. You’ll build scenes capable of driving installations, live performances, and interactive experiences without frame drops.
- Expanded POP Vocabulary: Gain hands-on experience with Particle POP, Field POP, Math Mix POP, Noise POP, Random POP, Transform POP, Lookup Tex POP, Revolve POP, Attribute POP, and more. Each tool becomes more understandable through applied use in content building rather than abstract explanation.
- Reusable Modular Systems: Every module—seagrass, rocks, bubbles, flocking—is a standalone system you can drop into future projects. Build a personal library of procedural tools as you learn.
Pre-requisites
It is recommended that you finish the POP Fundamentals course before beginning this course:
https://pro.interactiveimmersive.io/courses/pop-fundamentals-in-touchdesigner/