This piece here by Dvein is what got me into attempting some procedural generation in Cinema. I'm not sure what package they used, but I thought something similar could easily be recreated in Cinema using the displacement features. I wasn't sure if I wanted to approach it with the sub-poly displacement (since it's so much faster in the viewport) or with the deformer, but I ended up pursuing the latter due to it's faster visual feedback.

The first approach was to create the crystal growth. This was just a matter of using a Cloner filled with pyramid objects with a chamfered bevel, cloned to an object (a flat plane). Using a Noise shader under a Gradient shader (with some turbulence) I drew the clones onto the surface and then off again. I used a delay effector to give them a slight wiggle to make it look more organic as well as a random effector to give all the clones a slight clumping. I duplicated the effect and increased the scale, then offset it in time.

Next, I needed to work on the displacement of the plane beneath to give it some nice deformations. I didn't want to drive it with turbulence or noise though. I wanted to have control over where the cracks and acidic melting of the geometry occurred. So I built a quick tracer system that constrained a sphere to a plane, then linked the sphere to a tracer. The biggest and most important step is the Proximal shader. This baby is awesome and it's my first testing with it. It's a shader that you can connect objects to that generates a white to black gradient based on vertices, or polygons, or in my case, spline points.

I used it to link a displacer deformer to the tracer object, so that it maps where the spline is painted onto the surface of (in this case) a landscape object.

While this worked for manual moving of the sphere, or even dynamics, I wanted to use a particle system to get a wider sweep over the landscape, ideally with particles moving like vines. (Now that I think about it, this could be a cool use for a MoSpline).

So above, I want to be able to use this Thinking Particles setup to control the melting of the geo. It's not the fastest updating thing because I've subd'd the plane a lot, but I think this will be the method I use to do the final displacement. Maybe I can bake this somehow, thinking about trying to use Posemorph?

That's all for now.