During this course, students will create a fully procedural environment in Houdini. The course will cover Houdini’s powerful workflows for creating natural looking environments. Students will learn techniques for procedural generation and placement of assets such as buildings, terrain, rocks, grass, moss, and ivy, as well as procedural distribution techniques for assets such as trees, flowers, and bushes. Students will gain a better understanding of procedural environment generation, and learn how the power of procedural rulesets can be used to quickly create and populate different terrains with the same logic. We will explore advanced methods for realistic dressing of assets in the scene, and learn the small touches needed to add extra layers of believability.

The course will also discuss the differences between hero environment modeling and background environment modeling, and explore different techniques for scenarios where a high amount of art direction is needed vs needing to quickly populate environments with generic rules. We will also explore how to wrap these workflows into reusable tools for future projects. By the end of the course, students will have a fully realized environment that is highly customizable and reusable.