FOLIAGE
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.
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.
H21 | Project Dryad
Biomes
Natsura
Natsura is a third party toolset designed for artists and production teams in games, film, and creative industries who demand high levels of control and efficiency in foliage generation. It enhances your workflow, offering intuitive features that make creating realistic plant life faster and easier than ever before.
Integrated within the Houdini framework and fully compatible with Unreal Engine, Natsura enables you to bring your creative visions to life with precision and flexibility.
Unreal FEST
Elderwood
Scattering
Populate environments using scattering tools that lay down points you can use to instance foliage. Houdini provides different hierarchical methods for managing how the individual pieces are distributed in relation to each other.
SCATTER & ALIGN
Scatter points on a surface then copy or instance objects onto the points, to create large numbers of objects, such as a forest or rocky landscape. Attributes on the points allow variation of how to scale and orient the copies/instances.
ATTRIBUTE FROM PIECES
Attribute from Pieces is a powerful and flexible way to create the "piece" attribute used by Copy to Points to decide which model to copy onto each point. It lets you assign the pieces randomly, or according to various rules.
MASK BY FEATURE
You can use this node to mask the scatter, for example if you want plants to grow on the tops of things, but not in the dark areas below them. Or if you want to use ambient occlusion to scatter rocks into the cracks of other objects.
PICK & PLACE | SIDEFX LABS
Pick and Place is an interactive tool that lets you click and drag on the objects in the scene to place, scale and rotate them. You can collide with incoming geometry and your scroll wheel lets you choose which input object is to be placed.
Foliage Nodes
Here some of the nodes to look out for when working with foliage in Houdini. These nodes let you to quickly and efficiently build, scatter and manage different kinds of plant life for your environments.
LEARNING RESOURCES
Check out a growing collection of lessons focused on Foliage in Houdini.
Project Elderwood
Project Pegasus
Procedural World Generation
FOLIAGE TOOLS ARE AVAILABLE IN:
Houdini CORE | Houdini FX | Houdini Indie | Houdini Education | Houdini Apprentice