My Mood Board and Plan

For my HSE200 class project I've decided to choose a scene that is inspired by The Great War photography of desecrated, crater riddled landscapes, crumbling houses and trenches. I chose this style specifically because it would make use of the tools Houdini can offer, procedural modelling would give me the ability to create settings to scale forward or back the damage of the environment, for example, have more craters in the terrain or have trench lines deeper or windier.

From these images I've decided to take

Sketching the scene

Reflection

These are some cool images

Here is a picket fence I made following a tutorial (https://youtu.be/xRNlxz74suw). It gave my a great introduction into the node-based modelling process, learning how to use parameters to create procedural models.

Houdini is a powerful tool, it makes modelling much less of a chore, you can go back and tweak many settings and deform geometries to your heart's content and still be able to go back and tweak the geometry you started with. It is a great tool for artist's and game designers as you can make many small adjustments to your model without losing any progress.

This Module I learnt a few essentials for procedural modelling, for the blocking/bridging method I created a spanner from 3 separate shapes and joined them together. You can see on the right of the image it is little twisted, abit of an over-site on my part but I understood the concept well.

Here I did subdivision and creasing, this allows me to create smooth and sharp edges. The contrast of the smooth and sharp looks quite nice. This would work well for modeling props such as toys and statues.

This was a practice of using symmetry to create a door-looking object (more like chocolate).

I followed a tutorial on how to make a procedural tree as I got completely lost on where to start.

During this module I did abit of UV work on my tree prop, I couldn't get the UVs of the branches to match the same resolution as the trunk so this is an issue I will need to give more time to figure out.

Here is the final look for my tree prop, it features many parameters, going into this assessment I wanted to give myself a lot of options for prop, so i could make it fit all my needs. However upon reflection I released that many of the parameters were quite unnecessary as I only really need to change a small fraction of them to get the look I desire. Though I will be keep many of the parameters as I will most likely still want them, in future I will stick to creating props with more specific uses rather than a all-in-one.

Here i've tried to make a trench line out of various sections strung together. Though I ran into the issue of not being able to join them together so they remain separate for the time being. I spent a while scratching my head to figure out how to get the props to link up smoothly with poly bridge, but i could never figure out how to do it procedural and make sure any new sections added would connect up cleanly. Ultimately I replace it with a simple rectangle boolean which displaced the terrain.

Here are the final renders of the scene, i couldn't get the dead tree HDA working and the trench support beams don't bend with the trench so I will have to spend some more time figuring it all out. I also didn't get around to texturing so this is something I will have to review for future projects.

https://youtu.be/cAIKlzHKxvw - a link to the video showing off the final product