Terrain

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.

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

H21 | 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

H21 | 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.

Terrace

Crater

Machine Learning Terrain

H21 | 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.

Neural Paint

Heightfields

Terrain includes a variety of height field nodes including erosion tools with control over details such as fluvial lines, river banks and debris. Hierarchical scattering is used for more efficient placement of elements into landscapes.

Distortion

Terraces

Scattering

Gamedev

Terrain tools in Houdini can be integrated with the Unreal World Partition toolset. You can even wrap up a terrain as a Houdini Digital Asset and using the Houdini Engine plug-in ingest the terrain as if it was native to Unreal.

PROJECT PEGASUS

Project Pegasus features a 4-kilometre-wide island with valleys, forests and dirt paths inspired by the Scottish landscape. This detailed open-world environment includes open grassland, woods, and crisscrossed with dearth paths. Custom digital assets were used to help build the landscape and bring them into Unreal.

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SideFX Labs

The SideFX Labs team has long term plans for a suite of terrain tools. They have recently released some of these tools designed to build roads on tiled Terrains and to set up Biomes. There is also an updated Mapbox node with support for seamless tiling.

Terrain Nodes

Here some of the nodes to look out for when working with Terrains and Heightfields in Houdini. These nodes let you create and shape landscapes procedurally.

HeightField Distort by Noise

HeightField Distort by Layer