Tutorials and other learning materials will be posted here to allow you to dive deeper into this project.

UNREAL Project Files

Explore the world of Project Skylark with the Unreal project files. Check out the tools that helped build the scenes—including houses, foliage, and bridges. Make sure you have Houdini Engine set up properly to work with the procedural assets in the Unreal file.

Bridges Tutorial

June 26 | Learn to build a fully adaptive Wooden Bridge Tool in Houdini, ready for Unreal Engine. You'll use splines, vectors, and orientation logic to create a flexible structure that responds to its environment, complete with dynamic stilts, railings, ropes, and fine details like instanced nails. You'll also learn how to repurpose your setup into two spin-off tools and package everything into a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) for seamless integration into game engines.

Building Generator Tutorial

June 24 | Learn how to solve the main challenges for the medieval-themed buildings generated in the scene. Our HDA will take in a block-out that the user provides and automatically place all of the windows and beams for us. The goal is to create a solid tool foundation that can be expanded based on the needs of your project. We present alternative solutions to common problems you may run into, so the lessons learnt can be brought forward to your next tool.

Plant Pots Tutorial

June 19 | Learn more about how the plant pot was made. A user can use curve to control the main shape and the tool will adapt to it. It will scatter the leaves on the top, place handles on the sides and do a base UV. Copernicus will also be used here to make a base color texture for the pot/vase. If you are new to it, this will give you an idea how a tileable texture is made and previewed on a model.

Trim Sheet Tutorial

June 18 | Learn more about procedural trimsheets. For Project Skylark it was needed to have an approach where textures can be reused everywhere and trimsheets are great for that. Starting in our setup with making the geometry layout. Once that is made it automatically gets into copernicus and the texturing process can be started to make the trimsheet and its details. The Final video will then show how to automatically apply this on a 3D model.

Bottle Tutorial

June 18 | Learn more about Procedural modeling and scaling asset generation. First of we start by making a bottle generator. This goes from its geometry setup as well as handling UV’s and vertex colors. Once we got our procedural setup now we can think about scaling it to generate many bottles. In theory you can make 1000s or more! By leveraging PDG in Houdini we are only a few setups away from generating many models for a project.

Rock Tutorial

June 18 | Learn more about making stylized rocks in Houdini. The idea is that you take a sphere and apply different noises and deformation on top of it to make it look more like a rock shape.

Birdhouse Tutorial

June 17 | Learn more about procedural modeling by making a birdhouse. This was used in Project Skylark to generate different birdhouse assets. Start by making the geometry for the house, the approach will use subtractions of shapes to make a final asset.

Cloud Tutorial

June 17 | Learn about the cloud tools in Houdini. The idea behind the setup is that a user can draw a rough shape that they want and the tool outputs a nice fluffy looking cloud. We will leverage some of the cloud tools and sops to make this idea. Once a cloud is created, getting it into the game engine is the next challenge. 

More tutorials coming soon!