Working With Houdini’s New Mask by Feature Node

Stormz covers a new feature in Houdini 18.5 that can help when scattering points – Mask by Feature.

Every Houdini release seems like a mind-blowing amount of incredible features. While some tend to steal the spotlight, others recede, not grabbing too many headlines. Nonetheless, there are plenty of incredibly useful features. This new tutorial from Stormz walks through one of these, the Mask by Feature node in Houdini 18.5.

Mask By Feature.

The new node can mask scattering. A great example is if you want vegetation to grow on the plateaus, but not the crevices. Or if you’re going to use ambient occlusion to scatter rocks into the cracks of other objects.

Stormz runs through this in his new tutorial, showing how to scatter points using the mask by feature node and show us how to use point fields to drive the mask.