Hey everyone,

I wanted to share something I’ve been working on for a while now—a full cinematic environment built entirely in Houdini using procedural workflows. It started as a personal challenge to explore how far I could push Houdini in building a detailed, stylized world, and it eventually turned into a full course now available on CGCircuit.

Here's the scene with a breakdown:



Throughout the process, I created a set of custom HDAs to speed things up and make parts of the workflow reusable—especially for things like modeling complex trees, managing detail, and cleanup. The focus was on staying flexible while keeping things procedural and controllable. The scene leans toward cinematic quality, so it's definitely heavy, but built with scalability and iteration in mind. Karma was used for rendering, and the final comp was done in Nuke.

If you're interested in how it came together—or just want to check out the course, you can find the link in in both videos above (in the description on youtube). Otherwise you can always just go to CGCircuit and find it there.

Here's the course overview:



Happy to answer questions or just chat about workflow ideas if you’re working on something similar!


Cheers,
Ali

Here's a free episode from the course that you can watch today:

In this video we learn how to detangle curves procedurally in a smooth way and then create and HDA out of the tool so we can reuse it in other places.



Cheers,

Ali

I've been asked by a couple of people how I did the disintegration effect on the breakdown for this video. So I've made a quick 20 min tutorial to show you how to do this simple effect, and also a hip file included.