Sidefx Solaris Houdini | Part 4 : Procedural Environment Creation

Since I covered the fundamentals in past tutorials of this series it’’s time to levelup and put everything into practice. I’m sharing here a lot of tips on how I created a forest trail scene. Covering Heightfielf terrain creation, SOP import, USD layering, Scattering with lops instancer, Stage Manager, and most importantly : How to make your life easier when using solaris... because as your assembly gets bigger in stage there are so many ways things can go wrong. Don’t work hard... work smart ! 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:01:43 - Terrain Creation 00:18:34 - Relative vs Absolute path... relative wins ! 00:23:57 - Smart way to set USD path 00:26:36 - Structuring stage hierarchy 00:29:00 - Import Terrain (SOP) in Stage 00:34:37 - Instancing Methodology 00:39:59 - UnpackUSD vs ObjectMerge 00:40:38 - Scattering Trees 00:44:19 - Scattering Plants / ScatterAlign trick 00:45:31 - Scattering Leaves / Instancing variants 00:50:27 - More scatters !