Pepe Buendia

My Houdini Solaris Megascans USD Asset Builder (MaterialX) + Karma Lookdev HDA's is now available on Gumroad for free.

Build a Megascans asset simply by selecting the folder that contains the textures and variants of the asset.
You can set the asset name, specify if the asset includes a proxy, normalize the size (maximum size is 1 meter), set the geometry and material save paths for the USD, and define the geometry and proxy paths to determine how they will be read in the scene graph. All of these parameters can be adjusted without needing to rebuild the asset.

Lookdev the Megascans asset in Karma render. Rotate the asset, offset it, change light exposure and launch an automatic render by just one click.This tool is asset-agnostic and can be used to lookdev any asset in Solaris, not limited to Megascans.

Hope you enjoy it!



https://pepebuendia.gumroad.com/l/csqcv [pepebuendia.gumroad.com]

This is a breakdown of a project I completed some time ago.

A fully procedural city generator and traffic system created in Houdini.

I began by designing a NYC-inspired procedural building generator as a digital asset, capable of producing an almost infinite variety of buildings.

Next, I developed a procedural traffic system with traffic control. The cars in the simulation are controlled by VEX code within a POP network. They follow multiple rules to avoid collisions and adhere to traffic lights. I used curves to define roads and ran an algorithm to assign directions to each road, ensuring the traffic flowed logically throughout the simulation. Each road was given a unique name, and every car had a string attribute representing the name of the road it was currently on. This attribute updated whenever the car turned onto a new road. This portion of the project was inspired by the exceptional work of Franco Pizzani.

Finally, I combined all these elements using instancing to procedurally place street assets. I generated the buildings in a for-each loop, utilizing the digital asset I created earlier.

Hope you like it!

Hi all! This is a breakdown of a project I did several months ago.

I wanted to put into practice multiple RBD techniques such as concrete, glass and floor destruction, metal deformation while improving my lighting, shading and environment skills.

First I started with the destruction of the ground. I used a mixture of boolean for the big fractures and voronoi for the small ones. I also needed a force to trigger the simulation, I used a velocity volume to guide the destruction. Finally I added some debris and smoke simulation for the final details.

For the ground destruction I was inspired by the amazing work of Peter Sanitra who detailed his approach on 80LV. The simulation consists of a very fractured mesh with a mix of different constraints to give it a more organic behavior. There are glue constraints for the grass on top, hard constraints connecting large pieces of soil and glue constraints connecting other small pieces. There are also constraints to connect the soil to the roots of the tree. For the tree simulation I used the soil simulation to guide a wire sim and then transfer the motion to the tree. Finally, I added a grain simulation to simulate the sand and a pyro sim created from the debris.

The last challenge was the destruction of the car. For this I wanted to combine the destruction of the car with a damping system. For the fracture part I separated it into metal and glass, I used hard constraints for the metal that switch into glue when impact, and a mix of glue and hard constraints for the glass. For the damping system I used glue constraints to keep certain parts attached to the chassis and soft constraints for the damping.

I hope you like it!