The last lesson of Houdini is to learn how to create a plain using the numerous nodes beginning with ‘height’. Then Medhi goes into how to create water within the plain. I didn’t get to attempt to make any terrains but I did watch it through and took notes of how to do each part and screenshots of the workflow to refer back to.
Using a height field we can ad noise to make different surfaces which create different shaped terrains to play with.
- height field node: plain but its volume
- not voxels but they are 2D volume
- height field noise
Using attribute noise to a grid does near enough the same thing however I think that that different height nodes to use means there is more control and more options in your terrain.
- add volumes to height
- similar to grid and add noise
- could also use mountain node
- height field mask blur – colour visualiser
- volume wrangle
- height field distort
- height field terrace
- noise and distort means and interesting patterns
Adding several layers at a time means that you create a more detail terrain which is not the same in each area making it look more realistic.
- add these several times to create layers
Add water:
- grid
- noise attribute
- colour
- null – _OUT_water
- height field layer
- height field terrace
- height field erode
- convert height field node
- sub network input
- null – in model
- height field progress
- null
Height field erode means that there can be layers on top of each peak which might be snow then rock then grass. This adds more detail and layer in a different way.
- height field
- height field drawn mesh
- height field noise
My Houdini Evaluation:
This was the last lesson of the Houdini lessons for the term. It has definitely been what I have spent more my time learning as i found it fascinating and very rewarding once I have figured out how to finish a task.
I have much preferred the work I am doing in Houdini than any other of the pathways so I feel like for term 3 I will be specialising in Houdini FX for both my self initated projects and the collaborative.
I don’t feel like animation is really my strong suit as I don’t feel I have massively improved and find splining so ridiculously difficult. I think my second choice would be match move. However, Houdini is very mathematic and procedural which is quite a hard thing to be. I think that its harder to be good at Houdini as it is so difficult so I think I would like to use my mathematic/physics side combined with my creative side to create some really cool FX art.