Denis Kozlov is a freelance CG Artist and Technologist from Prague who specializes in procedural content creation. No doubt anything “procedural” will be accompanied by Side FX Houdini and this case is no different. Denis has created an internal design tool that allow him to design aircraft completely procedurally — no data is sampled from disk at all. He calls the Procedural Aircraft Toolkit “Project Aero” and it looks really impressive.
In roughly three hours or so, Denis can knock out completely unique aircraft designs that are complete with textures and weathering effects. That is, thanks to a shape-aware surfacing system that responds to changes in the geometry automatically. The system can also age the surface details parametrically.
The Procedural Aircraft Toolkit offers Denis complete control over surface details, no matter at what stage of the design process. The result is a completely editable model that can be edited with standard Houdini tools in the end. There are even preset AOV’s associated with the asset for easy compositing.
Denis Kozlov created Project Aero as an internal tool and has no plans to make it a tool for sharing or distribution. Still, it’s amazing to see what is possible within the context of Houdini’s procedural domain.
You can learn more about Project Aero, Denis Kozlov’s Procedural Aircraft Toolkit with Houdini, in this detailed post on Denis’ site.
