Creating a Procedural Terrain in Houdini
We'll start off this Houdini tutorial by recreating a part of the moon's surface by building custom deformation tools. Software required: Houdini 13.
What you'll learn
We'll start off this Houdini tutorial by recreating a part of the moon's surface by building custom deformation tools. For that we will look into fractals within VOP SOPs, then we'll place some pebbles and rocks on the environment. We'll be working with a simplified lunar moon rover model for this tutorial, which we'll use to deform the surface. The deformation system we create will be based on VDBs, and it will provide all the necessary attributes for the emission of the dust particles. At last we will use the particles in DOPs and create our own custom collisions to simulate the dust. By the end of this Houdini training we'll have discovered how flexible the environment is, and how well networks of different types can work together. There are a few different aspects shown here, which can be adopted in a wide range, and I use these techniques as a good starting point for many effects. Software required: Houdini 13.
Table of contents
- Setting up the Project 8m
- Constructing the Procedural Terrain 11m
- Creating Surface Craters 9m
- Adding Moon Hills 12m
- Utilizing the Lrv Asset 10m
- Analyzing Lrv Movement 11m
- Placing Rocks and Pebbles 11m
- Generating Rock and Pebble Geometry 11m
- Distorting the Terrain 10m
- Continuing Terrain Distortion 9m
- Combining Surface and Surrounding 10m
- Preparing for Particle Emission 11m
- Manipulating Emission Velocities 11m
- Preparing Clumps and Setting up Particle Simulation 8m
- Adding Surface Collision 9m
- Adjusting Collision Behavior 10m
- Checking the Performance of the Networks 10m
- Preparing Networks for Rendering 9m
- Continuing Preparation for Rendering 11m
- Rendering the Final Image 9m