Houdini Procedural Environment - Rhythm Of The Past

This Procedural Environment was my Final Project for my Mentorship Term at Think Tank. Its made to be completely modifiable in a small amount of time. The second iteration that I have rendered was made with 25 mins of  adjusting the parameters.

All the Land-forms, Hero-Hero Cliff, BG - Mountain are procedural and completely changeable(More detailed assets like windows were sculpted and imported from Zbrush). The Castle was inspired by the Belém Tower offers Interactive Control Over all The Major aspects that wont  change the Essence of the architecture. All the Assets are made in an hierarchical order and upon changing the parameters of the controllers; all the textures and other assets auto adjust. ( I have further explained this below in the breakdowns ).

This was my first ever Houdini Project and I learnt a lot of creative workflows while making this environment. This is a huge 10X10 sq. Km environment so I had to make several optimization Tools. Most of the Land Forms are made using VDBs and Height-Fields and most of the scattered assets were imported from Quixel Bridge with the exception of Trees which I made inside Blender using Sapling Tree Add-on. This Environment Took me almost an year of non-continuous work. Hope You like it.

Castle - Procedural Setup

Castle Node Tree

Castle Procedural Textures

BG Mountains

Interactive Scattering System

All the assets inside the Environment are linked in a hierarchical order. The Main Cliff in the foreground sits on top of the hierarchy. When the Cliff is updated, all the geometry based masks and noise masks are updated which are then combined with the mask generated with the Interactive Scattering System to outcome the position of the scattered assets. ( i.e : larger rocks and certain vegetation that should not be intersecting with the main cliff are automatically removed automatically based on these Geo-masks & rules embedded in the code ) The Scattered assets are further classified in to Primary Assets, secondary and tertiary assets. Primary assets impose rules and limitations on the placement of the secondary assets which further impose similar limitations on the tertiary assets. ( i.e : Larger rocks generate masks which drive the placement of smaller rocks and removes trees and tall grass from the area to avoid intersection. Similarly, smaller rocks affect the placement of grass )

The Masks Generated by Static Geometry and Scattered Geometry combined with other Directional Masks, Erosion Masks and Noise Drives the Procedural Texturing of the Landscape.

LOD System

Due to the Huge scale of the Environment for optimization purposes I added a custom LOD system to optimize the scene. It uses the Distance from Geometry Node to assign a  ' Dist ' attribute which i used to drive thee LOD Systems Logic.

Cam Based Frustum Culling