Houdini Terrain Generation, Past, Present and Future

At GDC, Ari Danesh Explores Houdini Terrian tools, Past, Present and Future.

SideFX Houdini Terrain tools are a great way to build realistic landscapes easily. The toolset comes with some sophisticated tools for creating erosions and more. At the last GDC, SideFX’s Ari Danesh explored Houdini terrain tools with a focus on the new errosion models. Ari also covers how to cet much higher quality results and how to create hierarchical scattering for populating the terrain. Ari also covers at ways that Machine Learning can be utilized to take terrain generation to the next level.

Ari Danesh is the Lead Instructor at SideFX. Before working at SideFX, he taught Interactive Design at the university level for 12 years. He started his career working as a Software Engineer in the defense industry designing displays and then leading a VR research department for real-time Command and Control systems during the first generation of VR applications. His current focus is on Generative Art, Natural Environments, Procedural and Object-Based Systems. At SideFX besides teaching clients, he dabbles in designing terrain tools.