Houdini Generated & Rendered Landscape

SEPTEMBER 2022 - Landscape generation, inside Houdini, using heightfields

Our current course is a 4 week Introduction to Houdini landscape generation whereby we have to create a landscape of our choice and render it inside Solaris, using Karma.

I've chosen to try and replicate a landscape, similar to that seen in the Glencoe region of Scotland, with lush grass and exposed igneous rock formations. Procedural scattering of trees was part of our assignment so my version of the area does have more trees than the reference images convey.

I was really fascinated with this project, as I haven't used heightfields before, and my time spent with offline renderers has been very limited to say the least. At the end of this project, however, my understanding of VOPS, masks, materials, and Principled Shaders has increased considerably as a result.

To add to the look of my scene, I've included snow covered mountains in the distance, although I haven't quite had time to perfect being able to add a distant fog volume to create the perception of depth and more accuartely emulate the real world setting. The same goes for the clouds, I just haven't had the time with this assignment to practrice look dev and persevere in this area. I hope to be able to cover the use of volumes in future assignments, in order to update my portfolio video.

I wish I had longer to be able to tweak my final render, and insert a sky replacement, with enhanced lighting, but my skills aren't quite there yet. For a first attempt, I'm pretty happy with how this has turned out, but there's definitely room for improvement.