Houdini Environment Builder

Overview

Houdini Environment Builder is a node for styling terrain, populating a scene with repeated elements, and rendering the resulting geometry. It combines tools for terrain generation, plant placement, stage material assignment, and rendering settings.

Important

I designed this tool to work ad hoc on linux, while it should be fully cross compatible, and I cannot gauruntee functionality on other operating systems or environments.

Usage

environment_builder_demo.mp4

I designed this tool to be accessible even for beginners of Houdini. With this tool you can:

• Configure, draw, and delete terrain or water using the Terrain page.
• Add plants by using the using the tools in the Plants page.
  • place, draw regions, edit regions, or delete regions
  • Make sure to add a plant with the "+" button first.
• Assign materials and refine their properties using the Stage page.
  • Use the edit network button or double click on the node to dive in and make custom changes in LOPs
• Render your final scene using the settings on the Render page.

Installation

Note

While I currently have no planned updates to this repository, if you find this tool useful and would like to request a feature or a fix, let me know by opening a new issue

To neatly contain all the parts of my tool and maintain portability, I've packaged it using the Houdini packaging standard.

The included start script will automatically generate and load the package.json and start Houdini using the houdini command. If the houdini binary is not in your $PATH environment variable you will need to change this line to path to your Houdini binary. eg.

/opt/hfs20.5.332/bin/houdini

Installation can also be done manually by adding a package json file to your $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR/packages directory. You can use this template to create the package file, make sure to replace the paths with where you saved the package.

{
    "path" : "/path/to/garden-package",
    "env": [
        {
            "GARDEN_TEXTURES_DIR": "/path/to/garden-package/textures"
        }
    ]
}

Additional guidance on generating these files can be found here https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/plugins.html