HOW TO CREATE A PROCEDURAL BONSAI TREE

Hi everyone!

In this tutorial series, we will create a procedural bonsai tree from scratch, entirely in Houdini.

We will start by modeling the vase and the soil, then move on to the core of the course: the tree itself. We’ll create a base trunk structure and build a custom solver to generate procedural growth.

We’ll also create the flowers using a small custom HDA for the petals, ready to be animated with KineFX, and scatter them across the tree.

All texturing will be done in Copernicus. We’ll create the full material for the vase, and I’ll show some techniques such as stone scattering on the soil. However, we won’t go in depth into the full “noise stacking” workflow for every material.

Finally, we’ll set up a Karma scene with a basic three-point lighting setup and a few materials, and take advantage of Karma’s Point Instancer to scatter the flowers in USD.

I hope you’ll enjoy it! ^^