Houdini rock cliff generator

sltrOlsson

Alright! Such a long time since I posted anything. Fun to have a project going again! 

I'm wokring on a rock cliff generator in Houdini with the end goal of making something that's game ready and setup for texturing. It's a portfolio project for school (studying technical art) and I'm very new to the software. The idea came from doing rocks and landscapes professionally for a long time. While hand sculpting cliffs is really fun, there's a lot of random shit that happens in a real cliff that hard to reproduce fast. And so this was the project that got me interested in learning Houdini, at least what pushed me to actually sit down a learn it. 

It's very early days on this project still and I feel like my large shapes would benefit from a smarter setup, right now it's the same cube that gets slightly rotated and scaled. Then there's better medium sized noise to come. The over all cracks I'm pretty happy with though. I'm also gonna play around with getting this over to a volume and see what I can do there. 

Here's where I'm at right now. 

sltrOlsson

Working on adding width to my hard edges using the voxelMesh node. Basically taking each piece of my large split mesh, converting it to volume and back to polygons. It seems to be a pretty solid way to add definition to my mesh. There's some nasty results coming from concave shapes though, something to come back to. 

sltrOlsson

Struggled with how my pieces gets cut up. Finally I've managed to cut at 90% of all the large concave shapes, avoiding most smudged results I had before. I still would like some large scale noise to break up the perfectly straight edges I have now. Not I'm moving on to getting this nicely setup in Unreal. My idea is to have a fast preview of the large shapes, a second view of adding cracks and finally a bake option that creates highpoly and lowpoly in the background. All that to make sure this will be a tool that could actually be used without having to wait minutes for every small little change.