Pedro Alpiarça dos Santos Shows How to Trace Isolines from a Houdini Heightfield Using a Trace SOP.

There is a way to describe height on a 2D surface. It’s called a Topographic map and it uses contour lines to describe the relief of a surface. Working in SideFX Houdini, Pedro Alpiarça dos Santos shows how you can create contour lines from a height field that uses the Trace SOP to take data from the patch of the terrain.

The contour lines will slice the terrain to get height values and place them on a 2D plane, working with a mix of SOP and compositing operators in Houdini. Pedro is in the 3D Animation Pipeline game working in the field since 2013. He calls himself an inventor and problem solver that loves to bring animation to life using code.