Live Rendering of Heightfields in RS

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Free Tutorials

Heightfields are a nice addition to Houdini 16 for environment work. They more or less replicate the functionality of programs like Worldmachine. In today’s tutorial Manuel shows you how to create a terrain from scratch in Houdini and how to render it directly in Redshift3D, without baking out textures manually.

By making use of the procedural image editing context in Houdini, the COP2 network, you’ll learn how to derive images from your heightfield volumes and use these inside of a Redshift Material using the op-syntax, known from Mantra. If you’re interested in learning the basics of this nice new area of Houdini, then this tutorial is for you.

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10 Comments

  1. Robert Wilinski

    Great tutorial, as usual on Entagma 🙂
    Thanks a lot 🙂

  2. La Patata

    Perfect! Is there any way working out terrains with heightfields any geometry?

    • You can convert heightfields to polygons with the standard heighfield tools.

  3. Pingback: Live Rendering Houdini Height Fields With Redshift - Lesterbanks

  4. Pingback: Houdini - Live Rendering of HeightFields in Redshift Tutorial

  5. Is there any way you know of to modify the UVs for the displacement grid? I’m having a terrible time trying to get a texture to not stretch on these live rendered heightfields.

    I tried a UV Transform, but that messed up the displacement. Is there some way to separate out displacement UVs and texture UVs?

    I’m not super familiar with UVs to begin with.

    Thanks,

    Jim

  6. Great tut!

    Having an issue, the displacement texture was showing up in the Redshift render view and then it just disappeared in future renders. Anyone else having this problem?

    Thanks,
    Chris

    • Hi Chris

      I had this problem and solved it by saving the heightfield node tree as a HDA and then bringing it back into a clean file.

      Best Wishes

      Paul

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