Earlier, I mentioned the tree leafing process that I used with the textures I made from Substance Sampler. I followed the development of SideFX’s Project Titan, and was really excited about using that functionality to blend into my landscape as much as I could. All of these started from baisc tutorials, and while I am by no means a Houdini master, I do think this led me to understand the direction the industry is going.
Houdini Leaves
In this HDA, I wanted a way to quickly go from Substance Sampler, which creates textures from photography, to full nanite canopies within Unreal. To do this quickly , I used SideFX’s Simple Tree Generator with Maps Baker to successively ladder more and more complex leaf textures up to 4k textures with single leaves, small clusters, and full branches that could be sliced and turned into different kinds of branches in Maya.
I favored an approach where branches more likely to be seen at eye level pulled from the hi res leaves, and laddering up to sky level canopy assembled from the smaller but fuller branches, such that the decreasing texel density was obscured by distance.
I used these various branches in Grove3d, then instanced and joined them into nanite canopies.
Houdini Bushify is a really beautiful tool that allows an Unreal user to place simple cubes into the space, and then run an HDA on them that coverts them into branching, flowering bushes. It’s a great way to add life to the scene, as well as to cover up any egregiously unfinished areas that might need it if I’m being honest. Special thanks to Radu Cius for creating this tool, and I encourage others to visit his page of Houdini Digital Assets.
Houdini Procedural Rope Bridge
My approach to Shenandoah Natural Bridge was to remove anything that looked like it couldn’t have been there 1000 years ago. This meant obscuring the cement paved walkways and stairs, removing signs and fences that made the are seem contemporary.
The one issue this presented was my removal of a fairly significant bridge traversing Cedar Creek and into the Saltpeter cave. For this, I decided I would test another HDA, Yeho Borsuk’s Procedural Rope Bridge, which solves the practical issue of a palyer being able to access the cave spaces, and is sufficiently modifiable that I can defer specific aesthetic decisions later. This is another aspect of HDA flexibility that I see could be really key in designing the look and feel of a game level.
I just wanted to briefly describe the use cases I found with Houdini for this project. I’m sure that both SideFX and Unreal are competing for this space as it matters for Unreal, and it was instriguing to recently see that Grove3d now has an implementation with Houdini. The implication of that for tree instntiation is great, as I think it may allow me to actually generate my Grove3d batches in Unreal proper, which definitely needs to become possible.