Houdini 18 - Procedural Prop Modeling - Skate Ramp

Explore Houdini 18's shelves in the user interface to create and manipulate geometry, understand how nodes connect, and use the box and sphere operations with gizmos, extrudes, and network notes.

Explore the Houdini 18 user interface toolbox, mastering transform, rotation, and scale handles, object and component selection, and snapping modes for precise polygon edits.

Master the operation toolbar to switch between object and component selection, adjust parameters like radius and grid with rows and columns, and use wireframe toggles and the increment ladder.

Explore Houdini's playbar controls for animation playback, frame range, audio, looping, and real-time playback, then create and scrub keyframes to rotate a cube through 360 degrees.

Learn to customize Houdini 18 desktops by organizing panes, splitting views, and saving your preferred layouts for efficient procedural prop modeling workflows, including geometry spreadsheet and Python scripting.

Install the Side Effects Labs toolkit in Houdini, update to the latest non-production release, connect via shelf, restart, and explore Labs nodes such as calculate occlusion for per-vertex ambient occlusion.

Learn to create Houdini projects with the project wizard, name them, and organize folders under Houdini projects. Configure home variable and dollar job paths to save files in the project.

Finish the ramp by building the railing along the deck, offsetting inward, beveling, and sweeping curves with Houdini nodes, then merge parts and set up a movie layout for uvs.

Operate a procedural wrap model with HD user interface sliders to shape and reuse variations, then organize clean UV layouts using group, join curves, and sweep node techniques.

Export and bake a high-resolution skate ramp mesh using side effects labs tools, create color id for texturing and masking, bake maps with whodini, and export game assets to fdx.

Assign vertex colors to the high-res mesh to create color IDs for baking in mix 2020 and substance painter; group selections and color each part, then optimize the low-poly mesh.

Export the game mesh from houdini 18 by selecting fbx and obj outputs, enable sbx when available, and batch export to the skate ramp folder for baking and texture prep.

Create a dust layer for a skate ramp using masks, a layer map, and noise, then refine with blur and prepare textures and smart materials for export.

Export textures at 2k resolution from the mixer, pack roughness into the texture, and configure maps for Unity and Unreal while organizing files in the project folder.

Import the ramp FDX and textures into Unity and Unreal, and review the results. Explore tweaks and additional resources to move forward.