• Use Houdini Heightfield tools to simulate erosions such as Hydro, Thermal, Flow, and more

This video shows a few landscape features used by Far Cry 5 using Houdini:

• Houdini Engine for Unreal reads landscapes as a heightfield, points, or mesh

• Create landscape layers, create textures, and material generation

• Take landscapes from Unreal and use Houdini Engine to convert it into a static mesh

• Houdini’s scattering capabilities

• Use PDG to split up large worlds into smaller sizes for faster simulations and help with team collaboration

• Landscapes exposes the inputs and outputs to seamlessly communicate between other HDAs

  • An example is you can use a river tool controlled by a curve. The landscape can influence the curve to guide its path while the river tool causes erosion to the landscape.

Here are some nodes and concepts you may need to understand before creating landscapes:

• All the Heightfield SOPs, some important ones are:

  • Heightfield SOP generates a new, flat height field

  • Heightfield Erode SOP simulates the process of erosion, creating natural-looking features

  • Heightfield Mask by Feature SOP creates masks based on criteria such as elevation, facing direction, or slope

  • Heightfield Noise SOP adds random detail to terrain

• Useful workflows:

  • Building terrain with height fields

  • Realistic terrain with height fields