Houdini R&D Experiments #2 (2020)

Continued exploration of using Houdini for realtime-game engines.

Additional Houdini R&D by Bryson

Happy Halloween 2019

Rendered in Houdini with Redshift.

This Halloween themed animation exhibits procedural jack-o-lanterns. For fun, I had 4 people sketch out black and white images as textures which I then used to carve out their jack-o-lantern digitally. For the face animation, I animated a face in Adobe After Effects and, using the frame sequence, generated a sequence of 120 models for each frame of animation.

These images were used as inputs to generate jack-o-lanterns.

Procedural Modeling

Here are some examples of procedural modeling using Houdini. I've been researching how to create systems that allow you to setup rules to allow the software to generate assets for a project. Project requirements constantly change so procedural generation can save time on iteration.

Procedural city generation using mapping data.

Building windows and roads.

Plugging in different styled windows on a per-building basis.

An overview of a procedural virtual cityscape.

Some procedural building layouts.

This uses L-systems and a seed to generate different building floorplans.

Simple example of how these procedural aspects can be controlled with sliders.

A demo for converting a spline path into a procedural brick wall, for a dungeon generator.

An example of this type of brick wall used in a rigid-body sim.

Particles

Particles are a way of life. Here are some of my experiments with particles and testing different ways of rendering them.

A particle shower.

Miura Paper folding demo

Houdini paper simulation rendered in Redshift.

For this demo, I followed a tutorial on miura folding to start to get an understanding of Houdini's cloth system, Vellum.

Wireframe preview of the simulation

Rendered in Redshift, textured with Substance Designer.

Other FX

Scrolling through a procedural terrain, displayed as particles.

Animation of bars controlled by a noise pattern. They expand and blend colors based on the noise value.

This is a visualization of the noise that's controlling the animated bars.

A flipbook of the animated bars.

A procedural scroll developed with a few nodes. Has a slider interface to control the amount unraveled.

Testing NPR and post-processing FX with Redshift.