Seaton Promenade

This was a start up project inside of Houdini for me. I've been a Maya user for many moons, but am working really hard to build some more technical skills around procedural modelling techniques, with a view to support my plan to become both a well-rounded Houdini Artist, and Environment Generalist.

This scene was a personal project, in which i used to learn more about USD and procedural modelling techniques. The pebbles are Quixel assets that i turned into variants with the component builder inside of Solaris, same with the grass on the cliff side. This made it really easy to randomise the look of this scene, but also for future convenience, if I need to call upon them again. Big shout out to Adrien Lambert and his tutorial series on Gum road for his help figuring all of this out. I'm not quite there yet but definitely on my way.

The cliffside geometry was generated procedurally using Attribute VOPs, after inputting some basic blocked geometry, and this made it super easy to art direct. The grass was scattered based off of Slope and Ambient Occlusion.

The beach hut has probably been the biggest learning curve, as I wanted to use procedural techniques. Due to them needing a fair bit of variation, I set out to learn and understand as many key concepts behind Houdini's procedural modelling techniques as I could. Rest assured, I got nowhere near, however what I did learn, is that you can get quite far with the match size and copy to points nodes.

The depth of Houdini is both scary and inspiring. Its really easy to get overwhelmed but one must remember that the tools are there to support the art that you make, and you should never lose sight of that.