I've been interested more and more by the procedural modelling capability in Houdini and have just started experimenting having spent a fair bit of time in Blender. In the last few weeks I've been working on developing a spaceship generator - see images below. There of course isn't really a brief, this is just me experimenting to see if I can come up with a versatile spaceship generator which produces mostly good effects by changing a seed value.
At the moment, the general process has been:
- Create a basic randomly extruded object.
- Slice the objects up along edge loops and extrude the sections at different random heights.
- Slice the result further following the same process, but this time to a far greater amount to get the ‘greeble’ affect.
- Add some further details using the same extrusion method.
- Use Shortest paths to create some tube effects.
Here are some results so far by controlling the effect by a random integer seed value. I used Arnold to texture and render:
What I'm really interested in is where I can improve. I'm particularly drawn to the work of people like Akira Saito. I've experimented with things like Voronoi fracturing, but wanted to come up with a different look.
I'd really appreciate:
- Any lighting/texturing tips. Are there other renders out there such as Redshift that might produce more impressive results for this sort of model?
- Effects in Houdini that might be worth considering, e.g. I am yet to experiment with L-Trees etc.
- Pointers to tutorials that might help me improve.
- General feedback on the look and feel of the images.
Many thanks!
Mark