Biomes
Terrain
Height Fields
Shape stunning landscapes with Houdini’s powerful terrain system, designed for flexibility and artistic control. Use procedural noise, masks and paint tools to layer and sculpt terrain with a workflow that feels familiar to anyone used to image compositing. The terrain interacts directly with fluids, crowd agents, particles, destruction and pyro FX without needing to convert heightfields into geometry.
Project Elderwood
Foliage
Scattering
Build rich, natural environments with foliage tools built using Houdini’s powerful node-based workflow. Use custom digital assets to generate trees, plants and vegetation with full creative control. Third-party tools like Natsura let you simulate real-world growth and environmental influences to craft intricate, lifelike plant structures that bring depth and realism to any scene.
Clouds
Volumes
Create stunning skies with Houdini’s built-in cloud system, designed for both artistry and efficiency. Sculpt individual clouds or generate full sky boxes using shapes like spheres and lines, then enhance them with noise for natural variation. Visualize your clouds directly in the viewport and render them efficiently with new materials optimized for Karma XPU.
Oceans
Spectrum
Create stunning oceans with Houdini’s Infinite Ocean Architecture, using layered wave spectra and point instancing for efficient, realistic results. Hero waves can be fully art-directed and blend seamlessly with spectral waves. Whitewater now runs at the geometry level and renders faster with the Ocean procedural for high-quality, optimized output.