CREATE PROCEDURALLY GENERATED CITIES INSIDE HOUDINI
In this course, you’ll learn how professional VFX artists create procedural cities inside Houdini.
Houdini, the titan of 3D software, has transformed the way we envision cities. With its power at your fingertips, there’s no limit to what you can create.

In this course, we will guide you through the procedural methods to design an intricate, realistic medieval city. This class will challenge your creativity and take your skills to new heights.

WEEK 1: PROCEDURALISM IN HOUDINI
A walkthrough of what proceduralism is, how it relates to Houdini and a gentle introduction and breakdown of the basic setups and workflows we will use throughout the course.

WEEK 2: PROCEDURAL BUILDING SETUP
We dive right in, exploring how to create and build a procedural building from the ground up, using what we learned in week 01 as a base and expanding. This is where things start to get a little more complicated, but we take it slow, and make sure each lesson is easy to follow, and by the end of this week we will have a fully procedural building.

WEEK 3 : PROCEDURAL BUILDING HOUDINI ASSET
Taking our setup from week 02, we work towards creating a Houdini asset, discussing what an asset is in Houdini and how we can begin to use Houdini’s asset and interface tools to create intuitive and user friendly controls for both ourselves and future users. We then move on to fleshing out our setup and adding some usability and features.

WEEK 4 : LANDSCAPE AND LAYOUT
In this week, in preparation for beginning our city building population, we begin to look at building out our scene. The two main elements at this stage are the landscape and the camera. Following on from the previous workshop, we’ll touch briefly on the ways this can be achieved inside Houdini – namely Houdini’s powerful heightfields, before exploring a new program – Gaea.

WEEK 5 : CITY BUILDING AND SCATTERING
This is where the course comes alive! We look at all the different ways we may need to build a city, starting with point instancing for quick turn arounds, curves for more art directed requests and then onto using OSM data to create realistic city layouts with roads.

WEEK 6 : VELLUM AND THE MARKET PLACE
This week is all about set dressing, and building a market place gives us an excuse to explore vellum, not just an intuitive FX tool, but also for us modellers. We can save a lot of time, and get incredible results by incorporating Vellum into our workflows, and this week will go through the basics, and also using it in practice to build some market stalls.

WEEk 7 : CITY ELEMENTS
This week will be about all the things we can do to add life to our city, we’ll look at hanging wires, some higher poly builds for extra detail, snow cover, creating the docks and a walkthrough of our hero buildings and how some of the details were created.

WEEk 8 : FINALIZING THE SCENE
This week will be about taking everything we have built, and creating that final image or shot. It will cover materials, ACES, AOVs, Lighting, Cryptomattes and a basic comp in Nuke.