Building a Scalable Terrain Biome Pipeline | Twan de Graaf | EPC 2024

Walk through the process of setting up a pipeline for controlling biomes on a terrain from scratch. Biomes can help you with the design of a landscape in a high-level way. They can for example be used to control the material designation of your terrain or drive logic in other parts of your pipeline. The goal of the pipeline is to create a very scalable system, by separating out some external data and to use that to control the logic inside Houdini. The pipeline is created using mainly the VEX and Python in Houdini. Both heightfields and polygons are used to show the strength of both workflows.

EXPECTED OUTCOME | After this workshop attendees will know new ways of extending Houdini, using external data. They should feel even more familiar with VEX and Python and know how to get the most use out of heightfields and polygonal terrains.

Twan de Graaf is a senior technical artist from the Netherlands and alumnus of BUas. He has worked at Ubisoft Paris for 10 years, specializing in the Houdini software package. During this time, he worked on Wildlands and Breakpoint of the Ghost Recon franchise of games.

00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:35 - Heightfield Setup
00:08:02 - Adding More Data
00:17:03 - Frameworks Setup
00:32:42 - Creating External Data
00:41:05 - Table Import
00:44:47 - Biomes Rule System
01:03:59 - Biomes Weights
01:22:23 - Biomes Custom Import Columns
01:32:02 - Biomes Custom Import Rows
01:40:33 - Biomes Scalability Filtering