Hi. Is it possible to create terrains generated in Vue and Terragen in houdini? i mean without scripting too much. :?:

yes.

the terrains in Vue and Terragen, AFAIK, are just very good noise layers etc…then cool texturing…
however I wouldn't try making an entire planet in Houdini…Vue and Terragen are designed/tweaked to do this kind of thing…in Houdini you'd have to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

thanks for your answer. but what about a small area? i mean not a whole planet.

I dont think its a stretch to say that you can do most of what Vue does in Houdini, and better. You'd have to be pretty good with Houdini to pull it off though. Even though vue can handle zillions of polygons, it doesnt do so in the viewport, so you could probably set up something similar in Houdini with instancing/delayed load. I dont find Vue's terrain editor to be very intuitive, and the plant models, with foliage being limited to flat planes, usually dont hold up if you need ‘hero’ models.

has anybody anyidea how i can make photo realistic terrains in houdini?

*) General deformation should be done on sop level - you could take a grid and start deforming it with a mountain sop, or use a vop sop with layered noise inside.

You might want to base your landscape on a terrain map (color and height). So you can then sample the color and height information from the texture to drive different deformers or vop sops.

*) The smaller details should be done on shading level. You'll probably want to use some displacements, again layering different textures and noise patterns.

*) photoreal has a lot to do with the way the light interacts with the scene. So you might want to study some of the pbr or other light setups here or on odforce. Also photoreal will include other elements such as plants, rocks and perhaps clouds.

*) For the rendering phase you will most likely need to split things in layers and passes as photoreal scenes tend to get rather heavy and you will have more control making tweaks in compositing.