Intro to Procedural Modeling with Houdini

Lets take a look at what we will be learning and making through out this course. We will walk through the main project for this course and demonstrate exactly what we will be covering.

To start off our procedural modeling session, let's learn a bit more about what types of primitives we can start with and learn how to create them in the Houdini interface. This will get us more familiar with the Houdini interface as well as the various tools available to use for manipulating geometry.

Houdini allows one to move objects around in a scene, just like any other 3D package. You can use gizmos or a property inspector to type in values. But, the real power of Houdini is in the fact that we can create procedural relationships between objects, such that when one object moves, another object will place itself procedurally. This lesson will reveal the techniques needed to perform just that type of procedural transformation.

Procedural workflows make use of copying objects over and over again, so you don't have to do it manually. This power technique allows one to make stairs from a single stair step model, or the trusses on a bridge. This lesson will walk you through the process of using the copy node inside of Houdini.

Because we are using Houdini and procedural workflows, we can actually start to encode data into points and use that data down the procedural graph to perform other operations. We will take a look at some basic applications of this procedural technique in this lesson.

When starting to adopt a procedural workflow, grouping objects and components becomes a very useful tool to allow one to isolate out elements to work on. This lesson will introduce you to the Group node and how it is used from the ground up.

When modeling in any 3D software package, one always has to delete different components on a piece of geometry to acquire the correct shape. In Houdini we can do this procedurally to give us yet another way to isolate out components we want to work with. This lesson will explore the delete node and its uses in a procedural workflow.

Utilizing curves and sweeps allows us to procedurally create surfaces from user created curves. This technique gives you the power to create roads, paths, organic surfaces, etc. We will explore the curve node and the sweep node throughout this lesson.