Procedural Modeling For Film and Video Games

Total duration: 12:00 Hours

Topics you will learn

• Introduction with Scaffolding Assets
• Mastering Digital Assets
• Working with OSM data
• Generating Custom Windows, Roads, Rooftop
• Making HDAs
• Optimizing tools with VEX

Chapter 1: Introduction and Scaffolding Asset

This week we’ll see and understand what procedural is and then we’ll create a scaffolding asset that will introduce us to the practice behind the theory.

Chapter 2: Mastering Digital Assets

Week 2 is all about digital assets, this is a really important subject in the world of Houdini specially when you’re looking to work with the Houdini Engine in either Unreal Engine or Unity.

Chapter 3: working with OSM Data, Making some buildings

Week 3 is here and brace yourselves because we are getting into the main subject here, TONS of info to process here (see what I did there?) .

We start by talking about OSM data and how we can use it, why is awesome but also why is, let’s say not that awesome sometimes, and we start to proceduraly model what would be ONE of the several building styles we will develop.

Chapter 4: Custom Windows

Welcome to week 4: This week we’ll develop a system to spawn custom windows to our buildings, this opens the door(or window) to adding ANYTHING on our buildings and will be the same method we use for adding doors and other parts to our city.

This system we are creating here is focused on PERFORMANCE, been as FAST as possible, spawning thousands of assets really quickly.

Chapter 5: Custom Windows Integration

Now that we created the fastest system for placing windows and anything we can think of, we will integrate it into the system we build before so we can loop throw the other buildings and start creating our city.

Chapter 6: Roads

This week we are talking about roads, this will be again generated taking the OSM data as our base and doing different elements to make the different parts of the road, like the middle lines, sidewalk, etc.

Chapter 7: Customizing the First Floor

As we mentioned before, the first floor of most buildings is most of the time different, so today you learn how to manipulate a specific floor, merge primitives and a few other tricks to customize how to place our modules.
This techniques can be applied to any part of the building, for example to add different areas that have different windows or doors and manipulate that area specifically.

This is a very important chapter cause it gives you a lot of tools to customize any area of your procedural models.

Chapter 8: Rooftop

Welcome to Week 8, on this lesson we will be putting together the building rooftops, adding AC units, with this technique you can add ANY type of assets on top of your buildings.

This is a really important part of your building, it gives it a human feel, like someone is really living there.

Chapter 9: Making HDAs

Week 9 is all about taking the work we have and making it into reusable tools, Houdini calls them HDAs ( Houdini Digital Assets ) this is the core of Houdini, a lot of the Houdini included tools are built like this, so you can make your own tools and use them in any project just like any other Houdini tools.

Chapter 10: Optimizing tools with VEX and Compiled Blocks

Continuing with the theme of making everything as performant as possible we will re creating the Lot tool we used from the Game Dev tools, this is to give YOU the option and ability to create your own tools and/or optimize existing tools, geared towards your specific use, this is great because it leverages and puts all the power of Houdini at your hands basically makes you a tool developer. TD or however you’ll like to be called 😀