Anatomy of a Terrain in Houdini

okay so um anatomy of a train so and how to creatively reconstruct it in houdini this is a very interesting uh topic festive fest you all know that um this technonics uh theory that the earth is made out of um you know some tectonics a handful of techniques and all the continents were together at some point and then they started to move so what we're looking at is just like billions of years of um change okay so so so when you look at when they were together that when they separate um some new lands are formed like new zealand uh aotearoa new zealand is a new relatively well one we say new means newer relatively newer if you compare it to like africa or like um parts of like middle china uh middle um persia so they they are old lands so they they pretty all so i will talk about what's the difference between a newly shaped like newly shaped which means like not four billion years but like let's say one billion years so the thing that defines the shape of the land is erosion so um let me go so so first thing first happened to the to the earth was volcanoes so everywhere where volcano and hot things were erupting mountains were shaping um tectonics were you know sliding on top of each other so when they were hitting each other the the mountains were rising up so um so the the new young structure of the earth crust um was so sharp and pointy and so but like through a process of erosion they got where they are now so what is erosion so erosion is everything that starts to shape the land to change the sh the shape of the land first thing first is raining you know so so let's i'm going to point at some at some point i'm going to talk about a very interesting piece of geological lands pretty close to us rangitoto island it's less than it's a very very young island and um that's why it's so different and then through you will see that through a process of simply fasting first raining you know there's a lot of rain every day every every year lots of raining so raindrops they start to create streams and and and rivers and floods and they move sediments from top um of the mountain to the to the lower areas so they create slums they move little things they soften the edges and then the vegetation so these two work against each other so raindrops try to wash away the debris out of the land but plants to try to keep them um so so other forces that move the land are rivers so like you know um we'll look at some examples that you see that the rivers they are strong forces of accumulated water that they want to like push things um and move build big boulders and rocks the streams like when it rains and then after that streams are shaped or floods which are the massive amount of [Music] sudden accumulation of water they move things very fast and very quick they are shape shifters of the land see in a gradual process washes washes away um the the sea you know seaside and coastal lines so so water is the main force but apart from that just just the weather like how cold it is um you know cold weather you know but especially in in lands that's um day and night the weather the the temperature changes suddenly so in some places like central um you know us or in mexico or in in desert lands in in africa or in iran so in the morning it's just like 50 degree celsius in the night is -10 so that's a massive drop in the um temperature so rocks this like change in temperature you know explodes the rock so this is this is the thermal process and then wind you know like i'm sure you have seen those fantastic structures that are made out of winds uh or glaciers like ice like ice is seems like static but they are moving um which i we just visited um fox and also joseph uh glacier what was that joseph something glacier um in south island it was fantastic and so it's moving that that massive piece of um ice among the mountains trapped there and it's moving and it's moving rocks and everything with it there are other things like mass movements like the technonics plates moving or chemicals these are elements that create erosion so you will see that in houdini we we have the same terminology which is very smart so um as i said the first thing um you know the first reason of the shapes we see in the crust of the earth are volcanic and tectonic activities um so you you see like levels of height so we have sea level we have sea bed so we have bedrocks and then it go so bedrocks like you know the the core of the mountains and then we have slumps and sediments traveling through top of the mountain to the river and so understanding all of that is important we will discuss that in details so as i said again the the cycle of the water is the main reason of erosion so like um raining takes away all these um little debris and sands from the mountains pushes them down to the river and then so those sharp edges become softer and softer through millions and millions of years so a train like this um seems well just it's a beautiful one but like it's a bit you know it's time for us to start to analyze it so um we have mountains that are have been softened um you see that this is kind of like an old land because the mountains on top are not like so rocky and sharp they have been eroded for millions of years and so but the the erosion has stopped at some point well has not stopped slowed down because of the plants because they try to keep the soil and hold it and not let it move that's why the first fight against you know movement of the deserts uh is is to to do the plantation so um and then you will see that like oh some of these little uh you know the pieces of sediments and and and debris and soil has been moving towards this the river and here you can see the terracing effect so some terraces have been shaped because of that like layered movements so we're going to discuss all of that this is also like again a older piece of land and you can clearly see that raining creates these streams as i said these streams kind of like carve into the soil and find their way out down the the mountain and they shape all these like you know um scars on the surface of the mountain uh but we'll see how to create that in houdini or this is a like um this looks like this is a this is colorado this looks like um like an old land like um middle persia which is like pretty much the same you see like this has this used to be forest we can say but now it has turned into desert um the reason that we can say that it's an like um eroded land is that things has been softened a very interesting effect here is that there must have been a sharp edge here at some point like millions of years ago but things has been eroded until like it has been clipped and flattened on top uh we will do that in houdini using the height filled clipping and you see that the river is eroding and all the like you know those like veins on the rock are so every desert gets a lot of rain they are desert but they get a lot of rain at some point and because there's no plantation and vegetation um the the the land is shaped so harshly this is a very nice area um which like geologically is younger you can see that like uh the surface of the land is so um sharp and and um and it's young and and you see that like the erosion is started to take away and change the the shape of the light glaciers like this one um which is a mount everest a piece of mount everest they chisel the edges of they look they they work like a i don't know what you call like those type of tools that you use to chisel the edge because they're sharp there's heavy and they move as a giant piece together so they easily like kind of break all the rocks and then then chisel and and make the edges of the mountains sharp and and and create those beautiful shapes so let's look at these eros and like you know these um pattern kind of phenomena in actual landscapes i'm sure that you all have many of you have played assassin's creed or you have heard of the assassin's story if you might have thought about where the legend has come from it's not a legend there has been assassins leaving here in this castle it's it's about an hour driving from my parents home so so this castle is located in a fantastic geological location which i i really like um alamut's fortress let's say they they they were so smart they have made their fortress here and they've been protected by the mountains and all the like kind of rocky mountains for centuries until um and they were actual assassins um very skilled not in that level of the game that you see but just like they were sending people to kill important people of their time so this is an old land that you see that like how raining for millions of years have softened the hills the hills are soft but suddenly sometimes you see such a such magnificent piece of rock coming out like saying manganoi i think we have that lion head up north so it's just like a piece of rock that looks like a lion head and everything around it has been eroded again and again until um some peace giant piece of bedrock has surfaced so and that beautiful you know shapes it's you see that it's it has a direction so that's a geological direction but also has been carved because of the wind so apart from that you see like um you also see like you know the some some when when the erosion has happened like around this area you see slumping has been shaped it means that the sediments has been moved from top to the to these areas this is again northern persia in mazandaran you see a phenomenon called terracing which we will do that in houdini today so in in an old land because of the volcanic activities you still can get um mountains like this this is mount stamovant which is relatively geologically a young mountain because it's a volcano it's again like it's one of the most my favorite spots um but like an old land like this is um i think it's tajik dashed or here you can see that like actually this is this is a very nice and if you want to like see a very original landscape you can see like how everything has been aged so much that the top of the the mountains has been clipped there's a lot of like soil has been washed down and all these things has been shaped wind has played an important role in like shaping like the edges um the the land has been flattened because it's been filled with all these like um soil that has been traveled through through millions of years of erosion we want to replicate those millions of years of erosion in houdini so these are the things that we have tools for it but the art is when you would be able to create such a thing this is a cave in in lebanon um so this is this kind of like shapes are made mostly out of chemical reactions within the cave this is the one of my favorite spots in my bucket list i've not visited yet in china you you see that like again like i can call like geologically china is an old land so you can see that like how why this this land is so unique and interesting because this is the battle between um life and all the forces of the nature forces of the nature like raining and you know look at the these rocks they are on the verge of exploding and and falling apart but these plants are holding the whole pieces together so why why so much rocks have been left upright but i can say that there's a lot of harsh raining right down so we will talk about the the the angle of the reigning in houdini and how to create um that so here you see again you see that all these like mountains have been eroded um the the debris have been traveled through the rivers to the um and then then they they shaped all these actually the fertile land land is the reminiscent of erosion actually uh fantastic place again in china i'm sure that you might have heard of this amazing spot so the the different chemicals create different shapes and colors we will discuss how we can replicate that this is a national park in south korea which is i like it very much from the images not visited yet and the reason is uh you see that like how changing the in the weather is exploding the rocks and soon these rocks will explode in you know smaller details they will get eroded down to the to the rest um mounts a rocky nutman cook that's the right name of rocky some mountain rocky so i i started from old lance to hi betty to younger ones so you can say that edges are much sharper here so they are so if this one has been in the process of i don't know let's say four billion years of erosion you can say that this one has not been in less than a billion years i'm just throwing numbers don't take that as scientific numbers um but we know we can say that relatively this mountain range is much younger and the the glacier on top all these um snow they are chiseling those edges down the beauty of new zealand and my favorite spot uh which is queenstown and the milford sound is that because it's a relatively young geological young land things are flat but suddenly you see like eruption of volcanic eruption has created these magnificent pieces that are in they are in the process of eroding using like you know by these streams on and and rivers um so you see that like these like monstrous mountains [Music] you know if you've not been there this is again like this is a one of the points of being in new zealand just go and visit uh milford sound it's like lord of the rings level of um uh landscape so this this fountain is 150 meters it's just three times the the size of niagara um so you see that like a sudden eruption has raised these kind of constructions and these constructions are in the process of erosion using if you remember a hydro which is the water changing in the weather weather which you can see it on top which is like rocks exploding because of the cold and you know hot and cold weather plantation vegetation tries to stop that so like all these phenomena is observable here and when all that forces of nature get hand in hand you get fantastic beauties of iceland so um you see here like like for example here you see how strong forces of nature nature has clipped and flattened the top of so this has been harsh winds and rivers and everything they flatten the top of the mountains they have taken a lot of sand and soil you can see that the sand and soil has been piled up here and then uh on top of that pipe you know fertile land you know you know all these uh vegetations has grown and you can see how nicely here water and i can say a lot of wind has carved this beautiful magnificent distortion in the land so keep that word distortion because so far we have been discussing about like vertical changes but sometimes you get this change within the horizontal you know uh levels and um look at this one like how nicely things has been slumped and piled up here and sometimes you get this alien type of natural looking landscape because the forces of nature is are so this is basalt coastline in iceland forces of nature are so harsh but might put you in a trouble when you want to live there but they create such a fantastic landscapes that both traveling there so here you can see like so you know that iceland is an active so there's a lot of it's geologically active there's a lot of volcanic uh activities happening there so it's pretty much at some places like here is like our uh rangitoto island where you see that look at the soil there it's black and it's sharp and it's new it's like recently erupted you know that age of an island like rangitot island in the geological uh timeline is like nothing it's just like a a newly born piece of land for us even innocent creatures this is anyway this is a considerable amount of time uh how is the what is the pipeline in houdini to get a train done so let's open houdini and when you press tab on the train you see a height field but actually you can create a height field and inside height field if you press tab inside train you see everything starts with the height field okay look at this height field when i rotate around it's all land okay when i press spacebar f wow it's it's a massive piece of uh land i can say it's thousand by thousand it means thousand by thousand meters it's like it's a square kilometer piece of land and you will see this is magical how houdini can create lots of train lots of details within this land so what is a height field a high trill is a 2d image what you will see here in 3d is actually 2d but houdini is constantly giving you a 3d simulation of that height fill you know a dot a pixel here has a value let's say it has a color it has a it has a x and y sorry it's a position but height fill it has x and white and height so that height gets simulated in houdini constantly to create that for you let me go back to my slides so like we start to messing so so don't be panicked by these shapes um this pipeline here it's very simple it has two parts blocking refining or detailing so blocking detailing okay so you do the blocking here and then you up scale and then you do the add the detailing it's like sculpting in zbrush it's like modeling in in zebras you put you know basic objects on top of each other and then um you um you do the blocking and then you upscale like in dynamesh or things like that and then you start um adding details so detailing so we go through through the same process because you cannot create a very detailed um landscape right away out of the box because that that might not be so creative because you want the creative control you want to create what you want so this is the important parts you know we have reviewed all these beautiful landscapes but the point is and in your projects in your specific projects you want to create a piece of landscape that nobody has ever seen it has to look natural and kind of like realistic but at the same time some so you won't be able to find it anywhere else in the world because you want to say oh that's the beauty of like the the creative visual effects because you just create that piece of landscape so let's start with um this part which is the blocking so the blocking starts with massing the model sitting lobbing and then remapping and continuing this again and again and again until you get what you want okay so what is massing a model massing is blocking out the larger scale structure out of the train okay you can use multiple um things first thing first is easy um guys um from now on whenever you just press tab and press hf height field so you don't need typed height fill just type hf and then after that type the thing that you want so i want to paint so here you see that the process of masking one of them is painting okay so just type hfp which is you just suddenly see height filled paint or patch or pattern or project so these so we use paint and project so we start with paint simple self explanatory it means that it paints okay so when i press enter it gives me a brush when i hold shift up and down i can paint with this brush on the surface let me talk about my own procedure i start with not painting but with projection how so let me go back out of go back out of height field hide it and add a add a box here let's work in that box you know that that box is tiny little down there so because height field was in this in the mag you know it's it's a it's in kilometer scale so i press spacebar f to zoom into that my box getting inside so i want to create a mountain range like a magical i don't know gateway to hell mountain range something like that but i want to block it with like some sort of you know strange things so first thing first you know how to start the center it's easy to say that copy this parameter for the center paste it here paste relative and then divide it by two so from now on every time that i scale this up or down up this stays there easy peasy so let's start do a bunch of things so let's say i click on this select i select the top face i start to go to the polygons so i i am randomly creating things so you can you can you can do create your own so this is the point so when you look at a landscape like like this okay so you say that okay i see a bunch of cones a bunch of boxes and a bunch of i don't know like again conal shapes and then there's the flat it's you know try to imagine your desired landscape in terms of boxes and spheres and cones and and make it okay so i create so i start just like doing some maybe some extrusions simple extrusion actually i would have liked that the the that parts would have been [Music] larger anyway i might take that one higher that better that's better uh okay so let's say i have like a bunch of these pile up in a i don't know a spiral way so let me create a grid here i press tab type greed and these i just want to pile them up like in a in a long you know larger area so this grid i make i middle click on the size and make it larger maybe yep that's a that's a good size for me and it's it would be a simple grid like two by two so you see you don't see anything in it but on that grid when selected just click on the view of it and then go to the um go to the create and draw a curve on it so i just want to like create a spiral care this is a magical land with all sort of things so curve is created here so now i can say that copy to points so this these this curve has a bunch of points and i have an object here okay i just want to scatter this object on those bunch of points tab copy to points copy to points in the middle this is my object these are my points you see lots and lots of points but i don't want that much i want just a little because there isn't the reason that it's too much because if you point 10 um if you go to the curve here and if you turn that dot you see that oh you've got plenty of points here so it's good to resample your care free resample your curve attach it in the middle and you see that with this uh i just have to go to here so you see that like the number of the the dots gets smaller and smaller so actually i can turn the visibility of copy to points on and resample based on that like a mountain range like this is not bad it's nice for me maybe a little bit more um they are two i just want to turn off the point display points they are too mechanical and ordered now so i might add a go to the deform and add maybe a taper so if you don't see it like right away here um and if i you press enter and you don't see it again just easy easy peasy hold that part and then stupid siri i'm teaching so press tab and type taper linear taper add it here go to the setting okay actually i want to add a bit of details here before tapering so i just create a maybe subdivide in the middle i don't want them to be so soft i want them to be okay crease value i want the cr so i want them to be creased in a sharp but like more detailed as well you will see that like all these like will go away when we're gonna create what we want because they're gonna be projected into the landscape so i go to the linear tapering uh it's good that you start with um oh not here if you're good uh that you start with this cat so the capture direction and everything so start with like something like a tapering and you see oh it's the direction is from z direction and it's quite visible why because the capture direction is on z i make it on y okay um and the capture length i just want to make it the whole part to be captured the whole length of it to be captured so you see that now all of that is captured maybe just go higher up as well so i want them to be tapered inward you know it's much cooler now isn't it what if i do the length scale here and scale them up taper inward more but make them more exciting by twisting that is super cool okay that's a super cool uh structure what about bending should i bend oh yeah why not because i i would like to bend it towards maybe around the z-axis oh yeah oh yeah okay so imagine that like i have a mountain range that reaches like just just think of like that mountains arrive here and these these kind of magical structures would be in the middle that would be super cool isn't it so let me save my pro by the way i am fired because i have not set my project so i have to create a new project uh i save it in desktop for the moment i call it magical train and inside there this is my project structure and this is train and then i create it and then i press okay before that i have to make sure that the project is set so i go to the edit to the alias and variables and inside variables i make sure that the hip file and the job is set to that address the job is set but the hip file not so i save the hip file there as well and okay maybe hip as well all of that in the same project folder we are safe now control s why it gets me there again so i just want to make sure that there's nothing okay it should okay so this is this is how you press ctrl s and if you press on job it has to direct you to the project folder which for me did it's here it's there so here is called train version one call it magical train version one accept okay so um the project is saved the project is set and saved so let's okay instead of let's let's work nice and neat okay let's call this blocking geo and let's call this um train someone tells me if it's trained or trained how should i distinguish the spelling from train is it the same train and train t rain and that one is train t rain okay that's thanks jason okay so let's go get inside blocking geo and then uh you know that for the sake of um oh we've got that nice manual things that you can use for [Music] shaping it um at the end of it i add a null you know that always we keep things tidy add a null and uh for a shape of you guys know that i usually click here close all this area open it for my notes and every time that i need attributes i press or parameters let's say i press p p stands for parameters so i like this one if you press z on your keyboard you get a bunch of shapes so i like the output nodes to look like a portal so i press z and make that round this is just like cosmetics you know this is just fancy works no no and i like to always keep the outputs grayish this is me so i press c for the color and make it grayish so and i press spacebar you will know what that spacebar is important and type out out blocking geo okay some nice and neat save it inside train um i just before start painting as i said i usually project and then paint you see that that's tiny isn't it so first thing first let me delete that paint first first thing first you have to object merge it bring it in don't be fooled by seeing it if you are in a node level and here you say that just hide other objects you see that your blocking geometry is not imported into this so train is a sub-level of operation do you know sub-level it's surface operators so here actually i just want to turn that on and turn this off so here i just add and so any any of any sub level operators work here so object merge here so go and press p and find it now you know that the value of that spacebar oh oh it's just brings it on top just select it it's imported here it's tiny um i i select this or maybe i just want to template this so when i when you are working on that one you will see the the area that that highlighted area okay so add a translate node tab trans transform make it larger pin okay actually i want it to be massive it's the center of my world okay so now i want to project it so i go and bring my height field on template hits drag from the output tab hf p height field project and this is my height field this is my projection object and it's projected into that now it's very rough and it's very organized so that's why i add some noise or distortion so okay so before distortion or noise um i am talking about so far i was saying that why we are here f5 okay so we are massing the model are we i said that it happens with hf height field project or paint let's do the painting as well so so let's say you want this in the middle actually i want it to be taller and then you want this not to be like that so some mountain ranges this is so unnatural so i add a tab hfp height filled paint and then i paint the area i press enter hold shift change the size as i want and i paint the area that i want the mountain to reach that maybe maybe there's a road to here like this road is in the middle here around the road are these kind of ranges nice isn't that beautiful we don't know yet because we have to add so this is a this is the the mostly used node here hf noise simple so you add a noise this one adds a noise to everywhere so far so you can say okay i had a noise but you want this noise to be applied just to your mask you see that this note has two inputs one of them is the geo or the height field the previous height fill one of them is the mask i can say that this paint has a mask grab that mask now you can see that it had generated kind of those disturbances only to those painted areas this is a good guide for me guys i can go back to the paint and i can start actually i just want to lower down the element size so it would be nice and refined and then not so but let's go harsh let's let's go let's uh treat it like like earth you know let's start with like kind of harsh volcanic activities sharp mountains and then and then erode it for millions of years in few frames within houdini so so i go harsh and i grab go back to paint and i paint it paints the area that i want to uh want more more of it so actually here i why the paint doesn't work for me oh there we are okay okay painting i don't want these areas to be so and the middle of it you see like the middle of it i i just paint what with like very soft touches of brush i wish i had my tablet here it's not with me i'm using mouse so excuse my drawing so the middle is nice as well sometimes you just want like to just create some disturbances here and there some mountain range here maybe or just valleys anyway okay so we did use paint and project i'm going to talk about something super cool here which is using satellite data elevation map for satellite data i worked on a project for a tv commercial that i was using um gis or geologic information system like satellite data for creating trains to make exact uh so let's say let's say let's click on that that i provided link here for you the satellite data i looked at so there's a bunch of satellite data out there um i think the the one of the easiest one to use is are these ones which is a japanese satellite that has collected a lot of elevation map from all around the earth so you have to register here i already did so if you click on this link it asks you for the docking so my uni email oh i should find my password hang on they emailed me the password okay let's go to new zealand let's go where do you think uh it's for sound maybe that area so it's a five by five the size is three thousand six hundred meters by so it's about three and a half kilometers by three and a half kilometers so if you download that information so there's a trick this is a tricky information because the the type of data here is very different than what you expect you expect to see a black and white photo that shows you like elevation map so the bright area becomes like mountainous the dark area becomes like sea level but there's a trick in it and also the point is just want to like close that one okay download it um so i'm gonna so when you open it um you get this elevation map this first one dsm okay when when i open it just like absolute black with a bunch of so there's like kind of some noise in it as well that you have to clean it in photoshop um so you have to find the remap values for that so here there's a guide for this specific satellite data the remap data so what is remapping you will see me using it again and again so actually let me share this for everyone so i copy this in [Music] k drive in teaching so if you go to the k drive in resources i make a satellite data if if i have spell satellite properly i don't know so you can use what i'm using now as well so what you have to use is just copy the address let's go up and create another height field and so i'm going to hide this one hf enter getting site here instead of height field just use hf file which is read a file press p go to that address and load that height fill dsm so it is loaded um takes time but you don't see anything the reason is that you have to as explained here where is that you have to do a remapping okay so make sure that height field is by axis which is y-axis the grid size should be the here um the the data here says i think at some point says that the the size of the piece of land that has been blocked with that in that block is 3 600 by 3006 so it's a massive actually um not here um greet samples three thousand six size yeah we just have to change the size 3600 that's it and then we have to change the do a remapping so size 3600 then add a remap height field remap everything is height fill here so from -1 to 1 and from minus 32 6 32 000 to plus 32 000. now you can see that oh milford sound is is there there's a lot of noises as i said but these noises can be cleaned either in houdini procedurally or before importing the map so you see that actually it's i would go and scale it up somehow not in the values but maybe height scale this is the right natural way but sometimes you just want to exaggerate oh not that much maybe 2.5 or 2 2 times okay so this looks like if you look at it properly it just looks like meals for sound that part that you just go with the sheep in the middle and enjoy those landscapes uh so it's accurate in terms of satellite data so that's another way it's just like again like it's not sometimes you do that i did it in a project just so i that's why i didn't phase it out as an option for you so i i just delete that for the moment okay let's go back where we were we were here okay we did our massing let's go to sitting so sitting is um you know guys um just think of this as a piece of land oh sorry i pressed think of this as a piece of land if rain comes [Music] here is so soft and the rain will pass by without creating nice textures on it nice grooves on it so you need like some details so again first thing first so you in in seating you just use noise um which we did as i said it's mostly used and then distort distort by noise is interest is pretty obvious but distort by layer is a very interesting thing um i'm gonna talk about so let's say i'm gonna um first thing first i want to get rid of that red so i type height filled clear i press hfc so i go find that mask clear so clear the mask and then you can add the noise you know why not height fill noise uh you know guys noises have different patterns so i don't like this very sharp noise here i might go for a i don't know other type of noises like a flow but very subtle very so this is zero just just subtle so see that some part of it gets some noise why not uh with a very low element sizes i just want to make that even lower 10. okay just make it a bit noisy that's it but what is interesting is that you can create a height field here hf you can you know add a noise to this hf n like a very weird noise like i don't know maybe manhattan if one noise on that one or manhattan if so yeah this is super weird but you will see that even this will be a very interesting thing to play with because this will chunk out my my train into interesting pieces actually i want to bring it up anyway let's keep it that way and then here i would say hfd which means distort and i distort it by noise and that noise comes from here or layer layer at this time i want to do hf distort by layer um think of think of height field as like a photoshop layers they are actually 2d images so they interact like they layer on top of each other yep that's the right one so you don't see anything interesting yet so if i go zero you can you can see like oh things are just happening now maybe i go high up oh yeah you see like but what is important for me is that my mountains oh yeah they are touched but this is so harsh so i maybe you do some some twisting as well if you do from top let me turn this note off you so you see so i press b without after without after so this is you remember that i discussed that some some displacements in the land are vertical okay so we need some seeding okay just like basically adding a bit of complexity bank so this is just a fascinating for the first iteration of erosion okay we just want to erode the land for the first time so if you just add hfe like which is erosion so this is the magic you know this is the magical part of all these train parts so go to the visibility of it it gives you a visualization which is not accurate so that's why you have to constantly go to the visualization and say compute range so it does the compute it computes the range for you i might say that so this is just visualization don't take it serious but you can make it fun i can say that i have a bit of snow on top but here would be just kind of like a mountain rocky thingy kind of like dark rocks um i just want more snow and more i add one here how can i add it double click here double click that one i just want it to be [Music] like that rock again so i have a wide range of rocky things and then plants or just vegetation begins i like dark vegetation there and here as well even darker there and lots of soil down here so not so much more soil yeah this is a bit more fascinating but it's more interesting not fascinating interesting for me i would go and say okay so let me do the erosion without so here you see that i am saying use very harsh and aggressive eroding before doing that let me just play press play that's it uh play so you see that suddenly yeah millions of years of erosions begin frame by frame okay i so while it's working i just want to point at things for you first thing first what we see here is the erosion with heat row or thermal the same concept that we just discussed so we have hydro which is water streams and rivers and things like that we have thermal we have even i'm gonna i press escape i just go back so you see that here like erosion starts like years and years are passing by so it's not harsh yet it's very subtle that's why you see all these like kind of nice and subtle streams but it doesn't erode things like the way that like millions of years do uh but the interesting thing is that you see like every concept that we've been discussing like hydro erosion thermal erosion you see precipitation like the amount of rain so here so let's do that let's go back to the beginning we're going to make it harsh so we go to the advanced we go to the hero the bullety what a word there and say here it says that don't erode anything right away just like you know have some so they so it takes some time so till erosion happens but i say no start eroding everything very harsh and ramp up no not gradually but just right away initial factor should it erode right away or just take some step by step and then gradually start to erode it says half half but i just say no just start eroding slope factor so just imagine that you say that let me go to one of those slides let me go to one of my favorite ones like it's here i can say here in a in a in some time at history raining was like you know suddenly massive amount of rain just carved down all these things so that is here slope factor should it be subtle and just like gradually slowly or just like from top so i just lower it down say hey just like it wrote it harshly for me okay so that these are some harsh values i start white still have i should change something or [Music] maybe i do hit here okay i just wanted to make sure that there's there's no cash for some reason it was cached and not deleted after i changed the okay start this is a much harsher erosion but you will see everything that we discussed so far so what happens here do you see that it's raining harsh and it's taking away from top all the debris and soil and bring them and piling them in the mountain feeds and slump them so the water is chiseling so like whatever is um there's details the water just kind of carve the way around and and finds its way around it okay so you can see that those very harsh sharp corners here they don't get eroded because the water cannot suddenly kind of the water slips away actually i can't stop here if you're happy i'm happy it's from the very basic [Music] steps and then you can say that freeze frame so frame freezes so if i go back to the beginning it stays there it but now we need to do some some adjustment ourselves why not uh first thing first um you remember that okay so i'm gonna go look and show you the slides so we we do the we did the lobbing so we're gonna remap back on but before remapping let me just do a bit of shaping excuse me i should not do that here because of the education but i cannot resist myself to add a hf clip of because i wanna i really want to clip off that tip of the mountains so you see that those tips didn't erode i do it yeah this is much more natural i've got my magical mountain ranges yet they look naturally now okay cool so you can ignore that part which is a shaping part but i'm glad so it's time to remap here that one which means to like hey you know kind of squash things down and then because a land an actual land is created layer by layer the weathering and all this erosion washes it away and soften things but suddenly like a volcano rubs fresh rocks come out again it washes away and then volcano comes so it's layer by layer it creates it gets created that's where you use hf remapping and you hear you say that press p do a bit of compute range you keep using this computation it's a very cool thing i like it very much because it just suddenly give tells you okay this is the your low your deepest area this is your highest area what do you want to do with it so i say that that's the input i just want to crunch so middle click here go to that values and start to lower down the whole thing actually no i don't want it to be too much i um kind of work with the valleys too because the values get filled as well okay okay so what's the process i i do it once but for your own thing so let me delete these um those red parts it just annoys me so i just have clean mass clear mask so we don't see them so the process is that you have to keep doing this again and again and again until you build up what you really want bear in mind we have not started detailing there's no detail here it's all rough yet so okay i would start why not why not some magical statue is kind of guarding these mountain range let me bring some statues so you remember that i have some data stored in the cg models 3d scan so this website is fantastic guys it's called 3d scan it there's a lot of free advanced there's a lot of free 3d scans of amazing sculptures they are free you can download and use them so let me um i've got some of them here some of them here let me grab one of these i just file press p use that address it's not an image or geometry sequence let's grab this second one i think this is the indian one this is a fantastic indian sculpture which i added transform note actually i think to be more accurate it's cambodian not indian where it is where are you oh it's here i am going to why doesn't show that to me easily i have to be able to see it without those anyway i project it now easy peasy hfp project this that's my sculpture press enter bring it out rotate it land it there somehow that's too big okay more get inside more yes okay nice and neat you see that that indian goddess is guarding this mountain range [Music] what about a bit of painting hfp not op paint on top of them hold shift i want to make some of them larger so like like this one in the middle so let's decide first what do you want to do with this paint because let's say hf noise or distort by no no no let's add just noise and then come here and then say that this noise is going to be like a negative something negative yeah something like that so that's a nice noise that i am looking for yay cool so [Music] ah that's a bit harsh then okay so i've got my paint here and i paint where i want this noise to function it generates new things for me new mountains for me ranges oh yeah you said that i think like we need some roads that just like so why not some mountain ranges oh this is a valley how can i make it not valid but a instead of replace i'm gonna add to it still creates value for me opacity minus one doesn't do anything for me maximum i want a mountain another valley paint method oh height no i want to do mask not tight maximum sharpen that multiply doesn't do anything for me at anyway i don't know how but like at some point it just generates mountain range like here over there generates it generates some valley foreground backgrounds background value is zero so why not say background value is one still creates value for me not anyway so the point is you can carry on and create some areas of interest more changes here and there okay make it a little bit more fascinating so that's called then you go through this process until you're happy okay so let's say we're happy we have our sculpture added there as well which is nice it has that split of it i don't like this area so i might paint that out yeah okay i don't like that top part and here and here okay cool so this is okay so you're happy this is the time for upscaling so it's height field resample so you remember that height fit is like volumes you know voxels if you if you have worked with volumes in houdini you know what they are so the denser the the more accurate you get but we don't want to go so dense that it stops our computer and explodes our cpu uh we just go like three times denser for now so you see let me let's have a look at here one three so you see that things become finer okay so uh we're doing remapping we did remapping we are doing up sampling so again blocking detailing we did the blocking did we so we are doing the up sampling now so up sampling just happened what we should do now start shaping so shaping is two things terracing and clip these are like my favorite things um let me clear clear all the um first thing first let me save it and then let me clear all the masks height fill clear mask so we don't see any mask here i would like to see some terraces i would like to see some clipping on the head so hf clipping on top of them the the mountains not too much just a little for those top ones make it soft clipping okay this is a beautiful part terracing i like terracing uh there is an amazing place on earth that everyone should visit it's in turkey it's called palma color it's fantastic you see the magic of terracing there just go there and it's salty water and all these piercings are naturally occurred because of eruption and volcanic activities is just brilliant magnificent so i [Music] add h f thirsty so it adds terracing to everywhere or like kind of um to this height you see you see that between so you can say that between this height and this height the terracing happens okay but that's not what i desire i want to direct it so first thing first you might say okay i know what to do i add an hf paint in the middle and i say that okay grab that mask from here so there's nothing here but wherever i paint let's say here the thirsting happens okay isn't that beautiful okay more here maybe at the edge over here as well and it has some some attributes like um kind of step size you can have like finer steps you can fade them slowly so don't would be so harsh their height soft edges you know you can do whatever you want and get like a beautiful terracing effect happening there uh i want to show you so that was painting i want to show you another feature that is very commonly used and i'm sure you will use it quite a lot and that's i delete this paint and i add a note called height field mask by feature that one and that mask is fed into here okay so mask by feature actually let me click on that so you see that so you can say that mask by slope so whatever is uh kind of like this angle of slope you know would be selected or masked by height whatever fills so i use this a lot because you know that vegetation is very related to the height so some some plants just grow on like between 100 to 200. i don't know if you have gone to pick uh herbs with your grandma if you're chinese or persian you definitely have done that um it's one of the most beautiful things in the world they know at what level what type of herbs grow on the mountain range so or if you look at the fantastic land escapes in philippines the vegetation of not art but just landscape you can see that yeah they are just so amazing so there's a lot of terracing there's a lot of plantation by humans in different levels different um different areas different trees has grown up so like so to so look at here like you might say that at that angle at that height so how to take control of that here so you can say that between like this height that and that height i just want to do that or or like pick some valleys so let's say you just want to say that okay so all the peaks or all the valleys this is actually just valleys let me go and or or direction so like this slope is very used maybe terracing happens wherever not over there on top but these areas get a bit of terracing okay now you see that those areas get a nice amount of terracing and it adds to our quality of the our work so we did what we did we did shaping it's time to reseed which means like why not add some more noise and distortion i don't do that now but i just go to the final erosion which is i just add because i am going to cover so i just erode it but this time not harsh but i leave it as a proper erosion i just go with the default value i compute range i adjust it the way i like i i'm going to delete that this is the mask color left by copy this here paste it here so i don't want the mass color okay so mount tip of mountains uh to be honest this mountain doesn't get any snow it's not so mountainous it's very it's like a tropical cambodian kind of landscape so i've got my here's my buddha she is oh there it is but just very hidden because of the terracing and aging um i'm gonna add some dark green on top i'm gonna delete this drag and drop delete latest some other type of vegetations maybe let's go even darker there and then i get soil and yeah i think that's that's what i want maybe i don't know okay so let it rain let it rain for a while like some millions of years so it will take time because it has higher resolution you see that like you know the the rain is slumping a lot of dust and dirt here in these areas which is very interesting there's a lot of moss uh and you know like kind of shaped on or like kind of formed on these uh rocky mountains like hard rocks that's what i was looking for just kind of those kind of ancient looking range of mountains our buddha is here we can feel it but it's part of the landscape that's beautiful part what i wanted rain is coming and is forming our land and it's filling the the the these pawns and and lakes okay the standard timing is like something at 30 frames 35 but i stopped here so i think that's enough for now okay 10 frames is enough so i say that freeze so again imagine that i have let it run for 30 frames to get a proper erosion sometimes i add a when you freeze it takes some time okay so it's frozen at frame 10 the reason it was taking so long because it was freeze at frame 20 for some reason i don't know why but um it's frozen now okay so what comes next so let's assume that i'm not 100 happy with this but i'm very happy you see that i can see like some hidden so sometimes as i said i add a camera so where's my light and camera yeah i add a camera to the scene i look through my camera and i lock here i make sure my camera is a very wide angle camera like a 18 mil camera and then through that camera i travel to my land through my land and see the feeling of it where was that yeah so let's travel through our buddha yeah so let's say i i travel through like i just go and travel fly over the land i generated and analyze that to get the feeling of it so yeah just let me unlock it go back to my perspective get inside train time to do the shading so there's a quick shading here so it's h f quick shading i don't do too much of shading i just show you okay so imagine that so if you go there everything gets like white but you get like a basic ambient shader and a base texture so you can just go and grab a texture or a color to everywhere let's say dark green or brown or whatever and then on top of that you can say that okay you can select your bedrocks and assign a texture from you can find amazing textures with high details on websites like polygon which top with double eye and then build up those textures here and use them or even shaders so you see that it looks at your project folder for the textures or you can just address your texture so bedrocks are here so so all the parts of your train has been selected has been separated so like bedrocks or tip of your um you know mountains where the where the snow can can accumulate cliffs sediments see so i can have like a yellow or kind of this color for the sediments so just imagine instead of that color you use a proper texturing for that [Music] so let me just select my debris and make them so here are the debris or can be used for snow you know just imagine that snow has fallen and this is the snow area but let's make it the breeze so debris are for me they are dark brownish so where's my water there's water here which is clearly blue so you can do some quick shading here i just did a table shading uh i would like to water the breeze anyway i you can add some other textures on top do the tiling anything you want so but it's still it's a good it's a quick shading that can lead you to it gives you so if your middle click here it gives you all these like kind of information that you can use for proper material making so what is fairly used is scattering heartfelt scatter so um you see that it scatters everything everywhere i just want to turn off the grid so let me do turn off the press b on that bypass the quick shade or not so you see that like scattering it scatters a lot of like uh these little cards everywhere so do you remember that masking that was very commonly used uh the height filled mask by feature that one i use it here because i want to select all areas that i want the tree to grow so i go let's say the tree will grow in these areas let's so that that that's my mask here so you see that like that now the scattering just happened those areas and just imagine that you have a tree let's make it stupid tree with a tube and spacebar f skate down [Music] and a cone or what are the basic shapes i just want a corn anyway i get a box and not here here box and i and i group that area and transform just that area to give me a thing and i merge these two so i get a stupid tree here another transform move it up scale up and this one's gonna add a color to it you know that this is a temporary color it's not a it's not a texture or shader it's just the scene color within your scene and a color to that one as well here a green color so anyway so that's my tree and i just go back to my train my massive train spacebar f here those areas has the scatter has happened but what should scatter the first one is the your height field the second one your mask the third one is your objects so now you can see that tree is everywhere why it's been separated i think i should have you know properly made them anyway so you can make trees and bring them like scatter them around bushes there's a scattering method called hierarchical scattering which you just kind of met oh that's why so if you merge you just match things one after another you start please read it on on the documentation of the houdini so you start with the larger objects then you go to the finer objects so like start with the trees and then let's say big rocks small rocks twigs everything so you can you can start to scatter things so you can achieve a and very nicely done kind of landscape in a short relatively short amount of time if you first understand the structure of a landscape so we did the final erosion we did a simple shading we it scattering let me go to the beginning so if you understand the anatomy of a of a erosion on a on a landscape you will get to know how to rebuild this properly if you analyze it properly okay so that was it for today

Channel: Hossein Najafi

Views: 916

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

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Id: 16P84gwtPEo

Length: 112min 13sec (6733 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020