One of my recent experiments was that I wanted to generate a base shape for a rock/cliff using some primitives. The idea was to use a vellum solver to make a shrink wrap around the meshes to get the basic shape, and then apply some simple noises to make the shapes slightly more interesting.

Finally there is a erosion system I put together using a fluid flip book solver as a test. I think a solution like this potentially could round off generated cliffs nicely, if the resolution of the mesh and particle sizes were adjusted - as it is now, the result is quite coarse.

Spent a few days testing out various tools and aspects of Houdini both for placements and basic mesh generating, as a friend and I are currently prototyping a game in a desert environment I've been hoping to be able to output a lot more in lesser time by sprinkling rocks and vegetion automatically.

My current plan is to space bigger cliffs and similar in the center with a bunch of smaller intersecting cliffs around them and rocks below as seen below. The red cubes are automatically placed using a mask created by curvature, slope and height of the terrain while the yellow surrounding cubes are placed using the red cubes as source points. The purple on the other hand is generated surrounding the first mask which created the red cubes, not the best explanation so below is a video, excuse the poor quality.



I have also had time to explore the labs tools for building trees and they seem real neat! Below is a tree set up to generate along a curve.



Furthermore some time was spent getting accustomed to ZBrush as well as trying out quixel mixer for texturing, definitely prefer this way of texturing over how I learned to do it manually with photoshop. Hope to create a few more and refined pieces to use for cliffs in my terrain.

As a level designer at Sandbox Interactive a few years back it drew me nuts how we at first built the world, most every rock and tree were placed by hand in the method of one click = one asset placed, it didn't seem very efficient use of our teams time or resources, eventually we effectivized the process but a lot of time went down that down into manually building everything by hand.

Scroll forward a couple years and I am better aware of how much our wrists could have been spared, I just hope the majority of teams doing these types of tasks these days quickly come to realize how helpful procedural scattering of objects can be as a first pass and I feel that I'm myself yet only to scrape the barest surface.

Made some desert dune heightmaps for a prototype game two of my friends and I wish to experiment with, also got to try out the texturing and other surrounding features of WC2 but I get a feeling I would rather do this kind of things in Houdini or other environments.

Used google earth to find interesting places to use as references, the biggest issue I have is translating the scale of the real world to something that would be useful in a game, something I will have to work on getting right.

Made a basic terrain with refereneces from a valley area in Chile. Also tried to use openstreetmaps to import the terrain to use right away as a underlying basis but didn't turn out so well at the first attempt, might have to revisit this unless I decide to use Houdinis MapBox tool for these kind of things...

These are my terrain results so far:

design.

Height, although the heights should be at least *2.

Current result, missing textures and the lakes are currently completely flat.

Also considering I should get rid of the titles for the log entries, too lazy to consider what to call them.

Started learning World Creator 2, goal is to use this as a basis for a level design workflow. From the sound of it WC3 should be releasing as a BETA in February which should be great since it will allow for better world composition.

Either what I would like to explore is a workflow based on the following:
WC Terrain -> Houdini for object placements, finer adjustments and scripting support -> Unreal/Unity.

For a proper production I suppose the whole Houdini aspect ought to be done with HDAs and Houdini Engine in the game engine.

Started building this website, intention is to keep it as light weight (and static) as possible and not include any unecessary libraries. Currently it is about 30kb of *.js, *.html and *.css, we'll see if it can be shaved down a bit further going forward.

Quite void of content but should be servicable enough for now.