Low poly diorama in Houdini— simple terrain
Let’s model a simple low poly diorama terrain using Houdini Heightfield tools.
Let’s start by adding a HeightField node. I want to add a car to my diorama, I changed the size of the heightfield to 200 so that a car can be visible. Houdini uses meters as units, so my terrain will be 200x200 meters.
Let’s make our terrain more interesting by adding HeightField Noise node. Amplitude changes how high the noise goes. Element size changes the density of the noise. With offset we shift the noise pattern. I usually play with these parameters until I find a pattern that I like. In this case, I arrive at these values (element size 200 and offset x -1431) after I set the next two nodes, which flatten the terrain so that it is suitable for a road.
I want the terrain to be more flat, so that I can add road. I flatten the terrain using the HeightField Clip node and setting the maximum to 10.
I want a shallow valley, so I used HeighField Clip node and set minimum to -10.
Just to keep the attributes list clean, I clear the mask using HeightField Layer Clear.
I have finished working with HeightFields and I want to start working with polygons, so I use Convert HeightField node.
To get the iconic low-poly look I used PolyReduce node. I keep 20 percent of the polygons.
Let’s color our model. I use Attribute Adjust Color node with pattern type bounding box. I change the color ramp to have two points and go from brown to green. Next, I manually set the bounding box’s min and max.
Renderers by default use smooth sharing. To give the polygons sharp, non-smooth edges we are adding Normal node with a cusp angle of 0. Check out how the model looks with smooth shading before and after this node.
The last thing to do is to add a null node (OUT_TERRAIN_SIMPLE), which we will use later. Voila, we have a simple low-poly terrain set up!
If you want create a pretty render, check out how to set up a rendering pipeline in the next tutorial.
For other posts in the series see https://medium.com/@werysltd/low-poly-diorama-in-houdini-series-summary-22478fb8eebb