Hi all,

First off, I should say that I am new to Houdini, coming from a Blender background, so if I ask silly questions, I apologise in advance.

My ultimate goal if to create sci-fi style car bodies using Houdini, akin to what Akira Saito over at Polyphony has managed to achieve, outlined in the talk:

http://cdn2.gran-turismo.com/data/www/pdi_publications/cedec2018_proceduralHardSurfaceDesignWithHoudiniLight.pdf [cdn2.gran-turismo.com]

Its in Japanese, but the images tell a fairly solid story.

Basically, I am looking for a way to sculpt contour lines into a car body.

So to go from a smooth body like this (ignoring the arrows, they are the authors):



To a contoured body like these:



As I mentioned, I am pretty new to Houdini, so any pointers on where to get started would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers

I general (I've learnt), there is little action here and you will get better answers on odforce or the thinkprocedural discord.
But I can tell you already experienced that

Hey derp,

maybe booleans are what you are looking for. You make a smooth shape out of Spheres etc. you can then convert these shapes to a vdb convert it back to polygons. from this smooth base shape, you can boolean subtract other shapes that define and create your design.

Take a look at the attachment.



Cheers
CYTE