Hey I'm really new to Houdini and I keep running into one workflow issue (mostly with Houdini Digital Assets)…
Say I have created a digital asset for the terrain in a scene, and another for trees that will populate that terrain. Would you normally create them as two separate HDA nodes like this -
I feel as though referencing the other object would be messy this way since you can't just wire the landscape to the tree scatter but otherwise would you end up making a whole scene under the one geo node??
There are so many personal and team considerations it is hard to answer what would be best..
My approach is always to construct scenes and assets from the point of view of reusability which leads to a lot of things.
- Terrain generation asset does create terrain and outputs data for other tools to pick. - The tree asset generates a hero tree that
A new asset to populate the terrain with assets, or rocks, or whatever using terrain data or user data does the actual job.
This way the tree asset goes the library for future jobs, the terrain asset will lead to a generalised one if you have more jobs on that same spectrum.
The populate asset will become super useful for many things so ultimately this would be probably my approach.
Obviously you will want to deal with LOD and huge landscape sizes which will make this terrain assets quite sophisticated but overall that would be the principle for me.
peteski … but otherwise would you end up making a whole scene under the one geo node??…
I actually most of the times prefer to stay under one geo node as much as possible and use objects only to really separate geo for rendering (to use with mantra filters or ) or when I occasionally need some specific functionality from object level
but it's ultimately a personal preference, I simply like to look at the network and see all the relationships, without having to constantly jump among different objects just to follow the dependencies, which can be really confusing and tedious
so in my world Landscape and Tree would be SOP level assets, which as well allow for multiple inputs and outputs for much greater flexibility of combining individual assets than obj level
Thanks guys, Yeah I think i might try and keep it a the SOP level since the connections are nice and easy to understand, just thought I might be approaching it the wrong way.
peteski … but otherwise would you end up making a whole scene under the one geo node??…
I actually most of the times prefer to stay under one geo node as much as possible and use objects only to really separate geo for rendering (to use with mantra filters or ) or when I occasionally need some specific functionality from object level
but it's ultimately a personal preference, I simply like to look at the network and see all the relationships, without having to constantly jump among different objects just to follow the dependencies, which can be really confusing and tedious
so in my world Landscape and Tree would be SOP level assets, which as well allow for multiple inputs and outputs for much greater flexibility of combining individual assets than obj level
That's what I prefer too. Do you also create dop/chopnets inside the same SOP network that uses them? What about the dop IO/import nodes? Do you keep them in the same network? I put them outside but would love to hear your take on this.
