Houdini Helicopter Landing Simulation Course

Create a Houdini project named helicopter_landing, import Poly Haven assets and MH 60 Black Hawk; set mud forest textures for 16k lighting and replace the broken FBX with a blend.

Install Side Effects Labs for Houdini 19.5 by downloading the latest GitHub release, extracting it, and placing the files in the Houdini directory, then restart to enable labs.

Load and prep the mh 60 black hawk model, isolate rotor blades, align and split components, then create a wiggle animation with wave nodes to simulate flight.

Load the Anthurium plant model, remesh the geometry, pin the base, and drive a wire solver with gravity and wind using volume velocities and curl noise.

Load the fern plant model, center it, and scale to five units in all axes. Duplicate the network, adjust velocity to two, and cache the simulation for fast wind-driven results.

Master procedural grass wind in Houdini by generating blades on a grid, scattering points, bending blades with point velocity and curve noise, and using attribute warp for realistic wind.

Build a procedural Houdini grass system that scatters animated grass on a grid using copy to points, attribute warp with noise velocity, and randomize scale for a helicopter landing scene.

Scatter ferns and anthurium on the ground in Houdini, randomize their animation timing with a for each point loop, read time, and randomize offsets to create varied lifelike plant motion.

Import pine roots geometry, scale to fit the ground, and align with the ground plane using transforms and a by-frame retiming method, building a foreground for future grass scattering.

Scatter vegetation onto the foreground train using static grass, fern, and anthurium, merge geometries, transfer names with attribute wrangle from pieces, and copy to points with controlled spacing and orientation.

Utilize the labs tree tools in Houdini to build a bamboo tree, adjusting trunk, tropism, branch generation, noise, pruning, meshing, and leaves.

Create a procedural bamboo tree using Side Effects Labs tools, including a tree controller, trunk and branch generators, and a leaf generator, with bending, resolution, and randomization for wire simulation.

Prepare a tree skeleton for a Houdini wire solver by organizing trunk, branches, twigs, and leaves, resampling and cleaning attributes, welding connections, and pinning the trunk under gravity and wind.

Configure wind velocity in Houdini tree simulation using velocity volumes, curl noise, and field forces; tune trunk and branch dynamics with damping and spring constants for Solaris bark and leaves.

Procedurally scatter bamboo trees in Houdini using file caches, variants, and a random seed to control wind, density, and distribution across foreground and background.

Build a grass particle system around a helicopter using points from volume, wind, and axis forces; randomize scale, orient with transforms, then merge and preserve velocity for motion blur.

In Houdini's helicopter landing simulation course, learn to import assets into Solaris, set up a pre-roll with a timeshift node, merge scenes, and render the scene.

Demonstrates assigning materials to prototype objects in the scene graph, applying textures for bamboo and anthurium, and rendering with Karma, including motion blur and subtle smoke.

Speed up renders by removing dust and vegetation, mastering effects compositing with color management and Open Color IO, converting acis cg to rgb, adding clouds, and applying curves and levels.

Thank you for joining in. Learn something from it and I will see you next time.