Houdini rocks

19 Jul 2016

More procedural rock experiments with Houdini.

Nodes in graph;

– Box / Cube : We start with a simple default cube mesh,  

– UV projection: Just like in your DCC software, a way to create your UV coordinates. But in Houdini it is recorded as a node. So you can easiliy change the settings, move, or delete the node.

– Subdivide: Apply a subdivision on the cube mesh.

– Attribvop: Network to modify geometry attributes : The noises are added to displace the mesh. After some small experiments I discovered that the following combination of noises works great for rockshapes: worleyNoise ( main shape ) + turboNoise + VeronoNoise.

Python node:

This node is responsible for two things:

1) Lock/Disable the settings when the subdivision value is greater than 5. ( Similar to Substance you have to take into account that all of your operations are realtime. So when you want to change a lot of values on a high poly mesh, your tool might get a bit slow. ) . Just lower the subdivision value to edit again.

2) Saves all the values to a presetRock.txt file. Next step would be to load the preset and set all the new values. I'm currently working on that.

To do:

-  I think I can make the control even better and add some kind of handles or curves that the artist can use to 'push' and 'pull' the rockshape

- testing houdini baker