PROCEDURAL CITIES WITH HOUDINI AND PYTHON

With expectations in VFX ever increasing, everything needs to be bigger, better, and faster than ever before. Huge environments are no exception to this trend. In this course, Procedural Cities with Houdini and Python, you will learn how to tackle the problem of generating vast CG cities, making use of Python and various Houdini techniques, while maintaining artist control every step of the way. First, you will be introduced to Python itself, and where and how it can be used in Houdini. Next, you will learn how to populate a city plan with buildings of various types, block by block, and how to automate this using Python. Finally, Python is again used to do the heavy lifting on the skyline, building a tool that ensures artist control over the height of buildings. You will use Python to import files from disk, read from and write to files, keep track of what the set-up is doing, build node networks automatically and to develop the technology required to make this city generator work internally. By the end of this course, you will output a vast, automatically generated CG city, instanced upon a point cloud containing all the necessary attributes. With this knowledge, you can go big while keeping your memory footprint as small as possible.

About the Author

Timothy Star is currently an FX TD at Framestore, having worked as such before at MPC, Electric Theatre Collective, and as a TD at Double Negative. Before transferring to VFX he worked as an environment artist. Timothy has worked on the cities for the Yorktown sequence for Star Trek: Beyond, did a variety of FX on Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and has worked on a number of commercial projects, both doing FX and building procedural modeling tools. He studied digital effects at Bournemouth University and game art at the Utrecht School of Art and Technology.