Biome Demo

Learn how to scatter plants based on real-world properties of biomes, environmental influences, and plant interactions. This annotated project steps through each tool of the entire suite of beta biome tools released by SideFX Labs.

The advanced, scientifically-based system models the underlying processes that occur in nature. Users generate biome regions that control the placement of the initial environmental attributes on a terrain. These attributes are evolved by the terrain shape to reproduce various environmental impacts such as rain shadow, wind exposure, soil quality, and temperature change with elevation. Plants are then matched with areas with their preferred climate and soil conditions, where they compete with nearby plants for resources, and the strongest survive.

Some biome tools require Houdini version 20.5 or newer.

(4 responses)

Asset Type
Scene File | HIP
Published
Oct. 24, 2025
Terms of Use
Standard License
Created in
Houdini 20.5
Categories
SideFX Labs, World Building
Download Scene Files [187.7 MB]

CREATED BY

baileyh
BAILEY HOGAN

Bailey Hogan is a Technical Artist on the SideFX Labs team. She has experience with Houdini to Unreal Engine pipeline integration and real-time content generation in Unity. (environments, shaders, FX)

More from Bailey Hogan

COMMENTS

  • spiderbr 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Thanks very much for that!

  • IsStuff 11 months ago  | 

    I gave the tools a good go a few months ago. one thing I did at the end that I wished I did sooner was test my plants in a grid with temperature rising in X and precipitation rising in Z. this simple grid with not too many plants scattered showed me why some plants were not covering areas I thought they should. I could see where there were places where no plant would grow and when I blurred values in temperature and precipitation, it made inhospitable areas. I ended up tweaking some generic shrubs to fill in areas like that. Perfect for debugging

  • TravisFX 6 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Hi Bailey, I'm going through the example scene and I'm having trouble getting the instanced plants into Solaris from the SOP level. I have a hunch it has something to do with the way the instance paths are assigned to the points, or @instancepath attrib. When using the Plant Definition node and sourcing from disk it generates a path to the asset on disk, VS sourcing from a merge node it generates an op:* path to the imported assets. When merging in the instances using the direct file path to the asset, soloraris returns an error, but using the define plants from merge it seems to work fine.

    Example:
    Source "From Directory" @instancepath
    = F:/git/SideFx/SideFXLabsExamples/projects/dryad/alpha/biome_demo/assets/mesh/SM_Alpine_Forest_Shrub_Growth_1.fbx

    Source "From Merge Path" *Done inside of a lops Create Sop Node with megascan assets*
    = op:/obj/Scatter/lopnet1/sopcreate1/sopnet/create/Var11_LOD0

    Do you think an update to the Biome toolkit Example scene can include a Solaris setup?

    Thanks!

    • baileyh 6 months ago  | 

      Hi Travis,

      Good find. It seems the instanced assets in Solaris will only work with operator paths or usd files. I will fix the referenced geometry and add a Solaris setup to the updated file. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

      Thanks,
      Bailey

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