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Gumminerd
Hi guys,

I am starting to learn Houdini in combination with Unreal and I want to use it for landscape creation.
Making lakes, forests, scatter rocks - this kind of stuff.

At work I already use Houdini for height fields (in combination with Gaea), but when I am done I send everything to Unreal and the world is empty. Obviously, there is nothing else there then the surface. For now, I just use the Unreal tools to liven it up but especially the scatter system in Unreal is pretty limited.

So I bought myself a copy of Houdini Indie to tackle this issue… but as many others it's pretty hard to find a starting point.
I am used to the height field tools, but after all the magic happens under the hood. I still don't get what attributes really are and how to use them probably. For example I want to draw a mask on the height field, extract this part and convert just this little piece to a mesh so it can be used as a lake. How?

So I am asking here about resources you may know that covers this topic (the overall landscape related thing) or will lead me into the right direction. I am not bound to height fields - important is, that I can adopt the technique to height fields. This would help me a lot!

Thanks

Best regards,
Auke
bobc4d
Rohan Dalvi has a good tutorial set on terrains: https://www.rohandalvi.net/terrains [www.rohandalvi.net]

Indie Pixel has a good terrain tutorial set also: https://www.indie-pixel.com/post/create-massive-terrains-with-pdg-houdini-engine-and-unity-2019 [www.indie-pixel.com]
Gumminerd
Hi bobc4d,

thanks for these links but I was not talking about landscape creation itself - more about working with landscapes.

A lot of tutorials out there are about effects, physic simulations etc. but it's not very effective watching a three hour stream about smoke sims and in the end there are maybe one or two infos in it that are related to my topic.

As said, I am not looking for exclusive terrain tutorials - more for tutorials that can help me understanding the whole thing and adapt it to landscapes.
dylanfries
I am feeling your pain. I am trying to get Houdini working with Unity and encountering many of the same problems. I think what people are suggesting is the Houdini heightfield is really its own beast. It doesn't work the same as the rest of the polygon workflow. Everything is stored as masks (including height) so it is really unique. I am also a noob but I would suggest that Heightfield Scatter (for converting the surface to points) and heightfield Resample (for converting to Voxels) would be a good place to start. As for more general stuff, learning how to select the masks outputted from erode Nodes and other nodes is probably a good place to start. The masks can then be exported individually (I am still working on this myself, but hf Output node seems related) and you can use them to mask in textures in the game engines. Like I said, I am struggling with this myself. The outputting of HF's seems particularly poorly documented.

https://www.artstation.com/gdebello/blog/jwyZ/houdini-terrain-heightmap-into-unity [www.artstation.com]

// Good tutoral but doesn't talk about exporting at all. Says Hmm every second word.
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/model/heightfields [www.sidefx.com]

// This one does a good job of explaining how to export the heightmap itself (for unity, but it is probably similar).
https://vimeo.com/269918208 [vimeo.com]

If anyone has any good links for exporting the textures from Alexs tutorial or properly dealing with splitting maps up I would love to hear it.
JabbaTheNut
Here are a few that I found very helpful for terrain creation at The Gnomon Workshop (requires subscription):

Houdini Terrain Techniques [www.thegnomonworkshop.com]

3D Landscapes with Houdini and Clarisse [www.thegnomonworkshop.com]

Creating Volumetric Effect with Houdini [www.thegnomonworkshop.com]

I liked the Rohan Dalvi and Indie Pixel ones mentioned above, as well. However, I liked the overall approach and depth of the ones offered at Gnomon. They are very focused on terrain creation in the context of a full landscape project. The last one is not really terrain, but the volumetric stuff will definitely be part of your terrain work.
dylanfries
Great, thanks for sharing the links!
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