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TOTAL DURATION: 22m 41s

Houdini includes a dedicated toolset for generating and shaping terrains. These tools represent terrain using 2D volumes, called heightfields, where each voxel contains the height of the terrain at a particular grid point. The Houdini viewport lets you visualize 2D heightfields as 3D surfaces. You can also set up mask fields that can be used to focus your edits to specific parts of the terrain. In this lesson, you will build up terrains using patterns, noise and erosion then export the results for use in a game engine.

In this lesson, you will create a landscape using the Heightfield tools in Houdini and bring it into Unreal.

The complete Houdini Foundations for Houdini 19.5 is also available as Downloadable PDF and a Print-on-Demand book through the Lulu Ebook company. This 224 page book contains 9 chapters designed to help artists take their first steps into Houdini.

CREATED BY

rmagee
ROBERT MAGEE

Robert Magee is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SideFX who has been working with Houdini for 20 years. He has created lots of learning material and demos designed to help artists understand how going procedural with Houdini can benefit their work.

More from Robert Magee

COMMENTS

  • josuamostert 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Hello Robert I hope you are well.
    I am busy with the Foundations / Terrain turtorial. In the first video (Shape the terrain using heightfield) you add an erode node called Slump , but for some reason when I do it it displays an error message. Are there any tips that you can perhaps give me, any help will be appreciated.

    Kind regards
    User of your turtorial of Foundations of Houdini.

    • rmagee 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

      Can you please post your scene file to the Learning Material forum - then I can take a look and see what might be the issue - I just went through the steps myself and everything seems OK with the latest version of Houdini. Be sure to explain what computer system you are using when you post the file.

  • harunpamuji 1 year, 8 months ago  | 

    Harun 3D Digital Artist
    0 seconds ago
    I can not import HDA extension file into Unreal content browser. Why ?

  • natrianvfx 1 year, 4 months ago  | 

    This terrain tutorial was a little bit confusing overall. Most of the time I had problems following the use of nodes because I didn't understand what they were doing. Eventually, when I tried to import the hda to Unreal, it did'nt recognize the .hdnac file, but it was interesting to see the possibilities of Houdini for terrain creation.

  • Seyonce 1 year, 2 months ago  | 

    Thanks for the course. it was simple and easy to understand as a refresher after watching more difficult terrain tutorials.

  • 0ldsl0 1 year, 1 month ago  | 

    I'm still not exactly clear on how the remap node was used to achieve that specific result. Robert seems to have deliberately chose which points he would need for that specific ridge.

    I'm following along but have my own set up where I want my ridge to slope down the Y-Axis and slightly bend towards the X. The remap node doesn't seem to afford me the control changing the position and value of points seems to make a lot of sweeping changes to the heightfield as a whole.

    I suppose just painting a mask and flattening it could be a way to go?

  • J Mart 12 months ago  | 

    For those of you having issues with UE not recognizing the HDA file format, you likely need to install Houdini Engine to your game project /plugin folder. You can do this to Unreal Engine itself, but the documentation from SideFX recommends installing the Houdini Engine plugin to each project. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/unreal/install_houdiniengine.html

    The issue I've run into now with this tutorial is that HEngine is importing my instanced trees slightly out of scale or translation, and as one big group of static meshes instead of an instance of the tree cone geo that can then be replaced. Seems to be a different type of houdini "output" in UE.

    • newkinostudio 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

      Were you able to find a solution to Unreal having just one big group of static meshes instead of an instance of the tree cone geo.

      Currently I'm unable to then be replace the cone & would love to understand the solve here.

      • miditato_r 11 months ago  | 

        In CopyToPoints node Pack and Instance checkbox

  • miditato_r 11 months ago  | 

    Please help me,
    in Unreal my cones do not match with the ground and hang in the air (
    in Houddini all is ok

  • Division369 10 months ago  | 

    Thank you for sharing this video Robert!

  • erook73 2 months ago  | 

    Hello! I have an interest in learning terrain building. I was surprised how easy this was to follow and not feel too overwhelmed since I'm new to Houdini. The only issue though that I ran into was the tree line. For some reason the red i could not get removed from marking that area. I've reconstructed this a few times over and still the same issue. I'm not sure what I am missing, but I had thought maybe it was tied to the mesh, when i was adjusting it. Not sure, but I'll continue to practice. Thanks for sharing!

    • KieranLatham 1 month, 3 weeks ago  | 

      Have you tried using a "HeightField Mask Clear"? You may be retaining some mask data from previous passes, in which case a Mask Clear should help.

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