TERRAIN & MODELING

Modeling creates detailed, optimized assets with clean topology, while terrain heightfields enable the generation of realistic, sculptable landscapes with precise control over erosion and texturing. Together, they provide artists with flexible workflows for producing high-quality environments suitable for both cinematic and real-time applications.

Terrain

The Terrain tools include a new erosion toolset that has been completely redesigned to deliver higher-quality results, faster performance, and a more intuitive interface with real-time feedback. Artists can control erosion strength and detail using masks, tweak parameters interactively, and layer multiple erosion passes to simulate changes over millions of years.

Erosion

The new erosion toolset provides faster, higher-quality results with a simplified interface, real-time feedback, and layered controls, giving environment artists intuitive, fine-grained control over terrain detail throughout the entire erosion process.

Copernicus

Adding Copernicus into the workflow makes it easier to modify height fields. This helps environment artists quickly create detailed, textured terrains with control over erosion effects, sediment, curvature, and other surface details.

Machine Learning

ML-powered terrain tools enable artists to quickly generate and customize realistic, tileable landscapes with trained erosion models, procedural controls with the option to add further detail or texturing downstream.

Biomes

The Labs Biome Tools give environment artists the ability to define rule-based systems for how vegetation and other elements appear and interact across a terrain to create natural and believable biomes. The tools handle placement logic and ecosystem behavior to generate highly realistic, procedural environments. 

These tools were created by the SideFX Labs team and can be downloaded as part of your Houdini installation. This full toolset is part of Lab's commitment to building an end-to-end, procedural system for environment creation that serves both game and film production needs.

 

Modeling

Modeling with clean topology ensures smooth deformations during animation, proper edge flow, and predictable shading, which is essential for achieving high-quality results. Reasonable polygon counts optimizes performance in rendering engines and real-time applications like Unreal.

Quad Remesh

The improved quad remeshing tool generates clean, adaptive topology with sharp edges, smooth edge flow, and evenly distributed quads that follow the natural curvature of both hard-surface and organic models.

Remesh Levels

The remeshing tool preserves both hard and soft features, maintaining clean, adaptive topology and smooth edge flow even when reducing a high-resolution sculpt down to lower polygon counts.

Unsubdivide

The unsubdivide tool reverses subdivision algorithms to reduce polygon density while preserving the model’s shape, making it useful for optimizing overly subdivided assets in a pipeline.

UV Flatten from Points

The new UV flattening tool generates clean, well-distributed UVs by growing them from selected points on the surface, making it easier to unwrap complex, high-resolution geometry while maintaining smooth topology.

Texture Baking | Copernicus

Baking textures from high-resolution geometry to low-resolution models allows artists to capture intricate details, such as surface depth and fine sculpted features, without retaining heavy geometry. This process optimizes performance by reducing polygon counts while maintaining visual fidelity.

Copernicus Baker

A fast, robust baking workflow allows texture artists to transfer high-resolution details onto low-resolution assets in real time, providing instant visual feedback and making it easier to debug and refine texture maps.

Mesh Workflow

The Copernicus baking workflow uses a GPU-accelerated ray tracing system to efficiently transfer high-resolution details into texture maps, enabling faster and more consistent results for downstream shading and texturing.

Texture Maps

The baking workflow generates a full set of detailed texture maps—such as normals, curvature, height, and ambient occlusion—allowing low-resolution models to closely match high-resolution assets while providing interactive cage mesh controls for precise, error-free results.

Texture Baking | Karma

The baking workflow can capture complex material properties like base color and specular roughness into simplified texture maps, reducing asset complexity and render times while preserving visual fidelity.

Karma Baker

The baking process converts intricate materials and multi-layered shaders into optimized texture maps, streamlining assets for faster rendering and easier workflow management while maintaining high-quality visual detail.

Triplanar COP

The new triplanar projection COP uses normal and position data to seamlessly apply and blend textures across surfaces, allowing per-axis control over scale, rotation, and offset for greater flexibility.