Houdini Projects
Procedural Simulated Bridge
This was one of the project I worked on as a part of a Houdini for Games workshop on DoubleJump academy taught by Grayson Cotrell. Grayson is an amazing artist and it was a pleasure to work with him on this.
The HDA generates a rope bridge from a curve and then runs a vellum simulation as oppose to usual catenary calculation. It gives it a natural look and enables the addition of collision and breaking.
There is also a built in VAT exporter that exports the looped animation for the given framerate.
All of this is done inside Unreal.
Chaos Destruction with Houdini and Unreal
This is another project started during the DoubleJump Academy course Houdini for Games by Grayson Cotrell.
Houdini part of the project is the fracturing and creation of Geometry Collections for Chaos. Fracturing is done in Unreal by an HDA.
There are parameters for:
- complexity of the fracture,
- number of pieces,
- size of clusters,
- shape of the fracture ( wood having slim pieces for example )
- region where the fracture should happen ( controlled by a mesh or a curve )
You can also specify if the fracture should be through the whole mesh or to create a shell and have a solid inside. Materials are automatically assigned to the inside faces and collision is automatically generated for the mesh that’s not a part of the fracture. Materials that were on the mesh (if you are using Megascans for example) are kept.
All effects are Niagara, muzzle flash, bullet impact and chaos destruction and crumbling.
Gyris Treehouses HDA
This is my first big professional project from a couple if years ago and I’m finally sharing what I did as a technical environment artist.
I was in charge of the procedural tools for the world and buildings of the game. This is the first post in which I will showcase the HDA for Treehouses of Duara tribe. I plan on releasing all HDAs for download soon.
The system itself utilizes SideFX Labs Tree tools for the creation of trees because using something like SpeedTree would close off the crucial part of the modeling that’s needed for the house to feel like the part of the tree. I have a separate HDA for the house and the output of that HDA is fed into this one, which is a lot more performant than having everything in one big HDA. The tool also automatically creates collision geo as well as 3 levels of LODs for UE5.
The project in question is unfortunately canceled but the story of Gyris The Sound of Trees Standing still lives on and you can find out more on their Discord and website.
Disclaimer – Textures, materials and models in the first 3 images are UE marketplace assets, the same ones were used in our HDA because we wanted to match that visual style.
Medieval Houses
Houdini is IMO the most powerful 3D software and the best one to learn in 2024. I started learning it in 2019 and right now I feel like I know my way around it quite well.
On this page I’ll be breaking down my biggest Houdini project – a Medieval House Generator. It is mainly an educational resource, it would not be used in production. Every piece of geometry is generated on the fly, no input meshes, it is built to be a thing you make so that you can then make anything else. Concepts, tricks, snippets I learned from this I use in my job as a technical game artist so it can be applied in a professional environment.
I won’t go over everything in the original HDA, you can get it on my Gumroad page ( https://mateocg.gumroad.com/l/dfYYi ). Also I expect you know your way around the software and have some experience with VEX. If not here is a great introduction to get over first: https://tokeru.com/cgwiki/JoyOfVex.html
I’ll try to make everything clear even if you opened Houdini first time last week but knowing a thing or two is highly recommended.