Michael Goldfarb

Hi,
While you can make tutorials using Houdini Apprentice - because of it's non-commercial license you are not allowed to gain any income, of any kind. So in your case, a monetized YouTube channel would be a violation of that non-commercial license.

My advice would be to keep practicing with the Apprentice version, and build a strong brand, while saving up for the Indie License before trying to monetize your work with Houdini.

you have lots of options:
Lidar SOP - for lidar
Table Import - .xyz or other types of point data
HeightField File for GeoTiff etc

using something like QGIS will help with finding images + terrain data for a specific location

if I open this file in Houdini 20.5.584 (this is the latest Production Build)
I don't get this behaviour - the rig seems to work fine.