Alpine Ridge

Inspired by a photo, with the focus on developing my own toolbelt inside of Houdini, I set out to create an alpine ridge, using some Quixel assets to support me.

The mountains were created procedurally using SOP level heightfield noises and masks, and then these were called upon inside the Karma material builder node inside Solaris, using a Geom property node. This allowed for a convenient way to separate textures such as the snow and rock layers.

The Quixel assets were saved to disk as USD files and then referenced inside a series of instancers. There were 3-4 collections of foliage in the foreground including Tundra grass, Downy Willow and Nordic coastal packs. I rendered a cryptomatte layer in push the variation further if it required in Comp.

Originally, masks were created from the rock geometry, to specify the areas around the rocks in close proximity, this then allowed me to distribute the shrubs around these. I then just ended up painting some masks, as I knew that the composition and layout wouldn't be changing much. I used reference to help place the plants around in a natural way and used water thriving species around the waters edge.

Displacement was added in the water to add a bit of motion, and i tried to ensure the depth looked reasonable, ensuring the texture for the floor, under the water was properly configured. The mountains were copied and transformed to create convincing variation and to optimise, rather than having separate sops for each. I used the render geometry settings nodes to set the visibility and matte status, to separate layers and set their contributions. Though, I did feel like there must've been a more optimised way of doing this, rather than placing lots of these around, after each affected piece.

I rendered out at 3840 x 1620 with a low pixel sample count. I think for the most part the layers were between 4 & 8 and I used the Denoiser to help a little.