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TOTAL DURATION: 1h 39m 29s

In this intermediate tutorial series, we build a scalable cliff generation pipeline that involves little to-to-no simulation, and which has a focus on art-directability and fast iteration times. This approach to cliff modelling is modular, step-by-step and efficient. Learn how to effectively use compiled blocks in houdini to balance memory and performance of systems. This course stars the inflate node that was released in Houdini 20.5, as well as Houdini's cluster sop. The end goal is to create cliffs for use in Unreal, without breaking the bank of performance or disk size. These cliffs do not use instancing, but each module covers a large area of the terrain, and is relatively low-poly, relying on nanite displacement in-engine to carry the surface details.

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CREATED BY

GeorgeHulm
GEORGE HULM

Developing Natsura, a revolutionary new plant growth simulation framework that blends art and science to solve production workflows for commercial studios and artists, and provides new avenues for botanists to explore plant shaping behaviours.

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COMMENTS

  • George Rolfe 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Lovely tutorial, however I wonder if the bespoke approach to cliff rocks could be combined with shape similarity (ransac?) to replace the unique rock pieces with re-usable assets, ie. quixel.

  • GeorgeHulm 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Hi George, I'm also very excited by this possibility. I was starting to think about using the footprints of the cliffs and doing a clustering algorithm on featuresets generated from those curves. If you start exploring this do let me know how you get on!

  • prerrro 2 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Hi George, thank you very much for the tutorial, the result is impressive.
    A little comment: I made 2 changes because following your steps I had 2 problems, the first one, some rocks keep floating in the air, so, with a ray and a peak after the second fracture I could insert the poligons a little bellow the terrain, second one, I couldn't delete the bottom of the rocks with your wrangle, so, I use a for each, into that the ray node again, with only the point intersection dist activated, and any prim bellow the terrain have a 0 dist, I delete those and I reach the same result.
    Thak you!

  • Simon Russell 2 months, 1 week ago  | 

    This is great. Keep em coming!

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