Saw a fun animation in this C4D thread:
https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/119136-modeling-of-spatial-distortion/
Here's my take on it, with some extra sauce added in (sphere avoidance and secondary motion), along the the default Houdini special sauce with full proceduralism throughout the chain:
The (semi-annotated) scene file is attached here. Disable the PolyWire node (that generates the wire mesh) for a lot faster playback.
spatial_distortion.hiplc