Houdini shares free workflows for game assets from Project Elderwood demo

With its flexible node-based procedural approach, Houdini retains a strong place in our pick of the best 3D Modelling software. It's highly regarded for CG work, and now we have new pipelines to make things easier.

SideFX has released guides to the tools it developed for its latest tech demo, Project Elderwood. They include a scalable cliff-generation pipeline and a tool for converting low-poly blockout meshes into detailed ruined assets (also see our guide to the best render software).

Project Elderwood | World Building with Houdini and Unreal - YouTube

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The Project Elderwood tech demo highlights procedural workflows for creating game content using Houdini and Unreal, with an emphasis on the Natsura plug-in's capabilities to generate rich vegetation for adventure games. Highlights include advanced modeling and texturing tools, with Houdini creating foliage assets through procedural techniques

the Cliffs pipeline provides fast iteration and flexible art direction with little or no simulation using the inflate node released in Houdini 20.5, as well as Houdini's cluster sop. Also released is a tutorial for Ruinify, a tool for converting low-poly blockout meshes into detailed ruined assets.

There's also a beginner tutorial on how to create tiling materials from raw high-poly photogrammetry meshes using Copernicus. This looks at using your own photos, generating a scan, bringing the results into Houdini, and learning to build your own 'make it tile' function, as well as your own 'hsv equalize', 'clone stamp' and more.

You can view the tutorials and find a link to download the Unreal files at the SideFX website. For Natsura, you'll need to request early access to the beta.