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Creating a Procedural Terrain in Houdini

by Andreas Vrhovsek

We'll start off this Houdini tutorial by recreating a part of the moon's surface by building custom deformation tools. Software required: Houdini 13.

What you'll learn

We'll start off this Houdini tutorial by recreating a part of the moon's surface by building custom deformation tools. For that we will look into fractals within VOP SOPs, then we'll place some pebbles and rocks on the environment. We'll be working with a simplified lunar moon rover model for this tutorial, which we'll use to deform the surface. The deformation system we create will be based on VDBs, and it will provide all the necessary attributes for the emission of the dust particles. At last we will use the particles in DOPs and create our own custom collisions to simulate the dust. By the end of this Houdini training we'll have discovered how flexible the environment is, and how well networks of different types can work together. There are a few different aspects shown here, which can be adopted in a wide range, and I use these techniques as a good starting point for many effects. Software required: Houdini 13.

About the author

Andreas Vrhovsek is an Austrian VFX artist living and working in London. He began his career in the feature movie industry in 2003 while working for CA Scanline GmbH in Munich. His work can be seen in movies like Avatar, Harry Potter, Total Recall, 300: Rise of an Empire, World War Z and more. His skill set includes creating water, fire, smoke, and explosions using proprietary simulation software within Maya or Houdini. Andreas Vrhovsek is currently working at Framestore, a British VFX compan... more

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