Houdini Beginner Tutorial Create a Terrain

hello everyone I'm Ben and we're gonna go through a very improper way to learn Houdini okay let's do it so if you're new to Houdini this is your viewport and you see your things there this is where we create nodes and these nodes have properties that we adjust up here and our parameters tab and then we see the results of all that work over here on our viewport or in our renders okay now let's create something so it might create tab I'm just gonna choose a box click it down there's a box here you can see it created a node and this node has a bunch of parameters that we can adjust that's cool and just be aware if you don't have redshift you and have this redshift so just ignore that next thing we want to have another we want to get some more geometry let's get a sphere hey there we go we've got two objects and our same cool and we can see them both and let's just rotate around them so I'm gonna hold the Alt key and click that left mouse button and orbit around oh yeah just like that now once I want to go and zoom in I'm gonna hold the Alt key and click the right mouse button yeah that's a good edge it's a really nice head really sharp okay very good last thing I'll do is go and hold the Alt key and click the middle mouse button all the scrollwheel as you're probably familiar with it being okay now some of you should be able to mouse wheel in as well I think cuz I've got these super gumbo key depressions going it's not letting me scrolling it out with a mouse meal but hopefully you're having a bit more luck okay so we've got two nodes here and they're in our object context you can see we have these different contexts so if were ever looking to create geometry we're basically gonna be in this object context okay we might use something like mat and if we wanna create materials and out if we want to render things out so let's just stay in our obj context my object context and let's blow away these nuts select them press Delete goodbye next thing we'd like to do is to actually create a terrain so I'm gonna with my cursor over here in this no review gonna press tab to bring up our tab menu where we create all of our nodes and then I'm gonna say hey create a terrain what's not cold a terrain we're calling it a height field and you can see after just typing a chi houdini already knows he is this what you're after exactly what I'm after I'll click that choose that I cannot see what this is this is just taking all my viewport so I'll press space and G and that'll frame up to the selection hey cool I can see the extents of my that's completely not a terrain well what we need to do is jump inside this height field and edit it so it looks more like a terrain and less like a flat plane so I'm gonna either press the i key to go inside it or i'm gonna double click it once we've double clicked it I have this height field node and this has one output and it also has some parameters that I can adjust for want to change those initial parameters but I'm really interested in just getting a terrain so I'm gonna click and drag out from this output and now it's prompting me what do I want to create well I'd like to press the tab and choose a node so I'm gonna press H key again and you can see that Houdini now has provided access to me because I'm inside of the height field mode there's all these cool height field nodes that I can add to my height field let's choose what we want wisely I'm going to choose a high field noise okay and with that we get a high field noise now if this doesn't doesn't pop up or isn't connected here all right you can cut the wires by holding the Y key and you get little scissors and cut across and you can see here that this is little red triangle saying hey you need to connect this input so that's why I'm clicking and dragging down like so okay another thing the fun way to disconnect noise is to grab one and just shake it really violently okay and we can just click and drag that one down to the required input great so we have that bar there's no noise why is there no noise well in Houdini we're gonna evaluate this node graph from top to bottom and you can see right now we're only looking at this blue one right this blue means this is our display flag that means hey Houdini show this node and that's all there is there so we want to grab the noise and say hey show the noise by clicking this little blue flag here so now we're seeing the high field with the noise applied to it it still doesn't look like a train so we need to well apply some erosion so what about if we click and drag out of this next output node and type tab and a chi and we say that we want some corrosion all right I'm gonna choose high field a road that's all connect it up move my display flag down to be a road and there's still no erosion but we do have this pretty psychedelic color here going on so I'm just going to say hey let's change this coloring a little bit because I don't know what's going on here now so I'm gonna move it to this visualization tab in our height field or Road node and you can see that it's going from minute elevation of zero which is if you orbit down you can see about where this grid line is speaking of which let's go ahead and hide that pardon me and then it's going up to 250 units and if this green one here is maybe 15 units up this white one here is probably way up in the sky so I don't want to have that I just want to have Houdini compute the range ah that's better good with the complete range all set up I'm just gonna go ahead and say I want this erosion to kick in now where's that erode button there is no Road button we simply go over to our play and that is our Road button so i'm gonna click play and just watch the magic unfold would you look at that erosion mm mm that's just what I want okay cool so I I don't have to let that go too far maybe 20 frames that's looking pretty good to me already and I I'm happy with that erosion I got some cool debris here I got some water that's formed and pulled up some nice erosion give me these sharp Peaks that is looking very much like a terrain to me okay now these these colors are pretty fantastic I'm gonna change them a little bit more to my liking so I'm gonna go and say hey down near the water I want to have something that's kind of green and blue and like it's been getting plenty of water and so there's lots of lush foliage down there yeah that's good and then as it goes up man maybe he's not quite so a little bit a little bit kind of more yellow little bit less saturated maybe a little darker and no it's gotta be it's gotta be bluer yeah that just looks so good hey speaking of bluer we can she changed the color of the water here because this is too blue and this is a layer unto itself here in our height field system so we can go down here and we can click on these little truck downs and we can see the layers that are available to us and so first of all this water here this was already set up here so I'm gonna go and just change the color of the water and say yeah that looks really nice I'd guess swimming in that any day so with that in place I just have to say what I want to do the tops of the mountains as well I'll just this color and say you should be a very cool salmon color mmm cuz Sam is delicious and that's that's great we've got a beautiful terrain alright and just try not to see the buttons over here okay now the one thing missing is there's no clouds so how do we do that well what about if we go back up to our object menu and we're in our object context top level and we can come over to the clouds tab I I'm just gonna deselect my hide field by clicking off it and go and choose sky rake and you can see down the bottom it says select bounding box geometry and press ENTER I don't want any bounding box geometry so I'm just going to press ENTER and what's happened I've jumped inside the sky rig node so I'm no longer in that top ibj level so I'm just going to while I'm in here press U on the keyboard and now I'm back to seeing my sky rig and my height field but I can't see my sky rig now if I select it and press space G oops with my cursor over the viewport there it is it's very very small so that's no good what I need to do is with my scurry selected change so it's 1,000 times what it currently is now I get some rolling flug in the hills still not what I want but I am just going to click and drag it up right you've got your your move rotate and scale tools here if you find that you don't have this gizmo up and that's looking pretty cool now except this is just all white this is cloud so I'm gonna come up to my light here lights and cameras and choose a distant light and click that once now I just click it into the scene we get this mode or this very over is melodramatic lighting scenario and I'm just gonna go and click on one of these rotating axes oh why are you not letting me alright click on one of these rotating axes and get to look that I like alright that's that's looking pretty cheery and so if I click off the distant light I can just come in here now and get all my all my cinematic goodness take a look around the world yeah that's looking real nice ok and that's how we make it a terrain in Houdini if you have any questions a problem in the comments below and I'll catch you in the next video bye for now

Channel: Snaplaunch

Views: 2,196

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: YcLZEeWI4FY

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020