Mike Abbott
Mike_A
About Me
Generalist 3D freelancer with many years experience in 3D modelling, technical and concept visualisation and 3D / 2D compositing.
Also highly experienced certified trainer in Photoshop, After Effects and PremierePro.
EXPERTISE
Generalist
Houdini Skills
ADVANCED
Procedural Modeling
INTERMEDIATE
Environments | Digital Assets | Animation | Lighting | VEX
Availability
I am available for Freelance Work
My Gallery
Recent Forum Posts
Help with curve, ray, resample & copy to points workflow Oct. 14, 2025, 9:35 a.m.
Projecting one mesh directly on to another like this is likely to have problems. If I understand your situation correctly, if you looked at a cross section of your landscape and road projections you're probably ending up with situations like this:
Two points of the two meshes don't match so when you project one on the other you'll get these bad intersections. Even if you could get one mesh perfectly projected on the other you'd then have co-planar polys that would be an issue.
You might know the old joke about the tourist who asks a local for directions. The local replies: ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’. Ultimately probably a better solution would be to use Houdini's heightfield system and Copernicus for this sort of work - but that is a completely different approach.
With the mesh based situation, a couple of thoughts - and all this depends on the relative density and complexity of the mesh you're dealing with...
1. If you've got a relatively simple scene and it doesn't need to be 100% procedural, some direct editing with the edit tool in soft selection is probably easiest.
2. A little extrusion of your road mesh to give it some thickness and height above the landscape.
3. Rather than project the road onto the landscape, extrude it down as a solid and boolean subtract it from the landscape. You can then build a new road from those new edges.
I'm sure there are other approaches as well.
Two points of the two meshes don't match so when you project one on the other you'll get these bad intersections. Even if you could get one mesh perfectly projected on the other you'd then have co-planar polys that would be an issue.
You might know the old joke about the tourist who asks a local for directions. The local replies: ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’. Ultimately probably a better solution would be to use Houdini's heightfield system and Copernicus for this sort of work - but that is a completely different approach.
With the mesh based situation, a couple of thoughts - and all this depends on the relative density and complexity of the mesh you're dealing with...
1. If you've got a relatively simple scene and it doesn't need to be 100% procedural, some direct editing with the edit tool in soft selection is probably easiest.
2. A little extrusion of your road mesh to give it some thickness and height above the landscape.
3. Rather than project the road onto the landscape, extrude it down as a solid and boolean subtract it from the landscape. You can then build a new road from those new edges.
I'm sure there are other approaches as well.
can i do all my study from tutorials in one project? Oct. 14, 2025, 7:34 a.m.
Total confusion I would think : )
If you want to stay organised you can use Houdini's 'project' system: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/project.html [www.sidefx.com]
If you want to stay organised you can use Houdini's 'project' system: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/project.html [www.sidefx.com]
Cloud Noise not working with Convert VDB Oct. 11, 2025, 5:15 a.m.
I think the issue here is that the 'ISO offset' SOP creates a standard Houdini grid volume, and I think the 'VDB convert' SOP requires a VDB input - which it's not getting. Although, when you look at the node info for the 'VDB convert' SOP it does suggest it's outputting a VDB...
EDIT:
Scrap that. Having had a quick play, I can see the issue: The isoOffset generated volume doesn't have a name attribute. Just add a name SOP - with a name of 'density'.
EDIT:
Scrap that. Having had a quick play, I can see the issue: The isoOffset generated volume doesn't have a name attribute. Just add a name SOP - with a name of 'density'.