Houdini Study - East of West Intro
This is the first scene from a great comic, East of West, written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Nick Dragotta.
This is actually the result of me self-learning Houdini over the course of 3 weeks. I wanted to learn Houdini for it's non-destructive modeling workflow since a teacher casually mentioned he did most of his modeling with it. All the assets in this scene (expect the skull and bone, which I sculpted in VR) were made in a non-destructive way so that I can easily adjust every detail.
This was an excruciating but fun experience and I'm glad to have this incredibly powerful tool on my belt.
The explosion is simulated in Houdini but only used in Unreal for a couple frames to give the pieces velocity. After that it switches to physics simulation directly in Unreal, so it collides with the other objects in real time.
This is designed so that I can easily adjust the number and shape of the pillars and they will always each be different.
I can easily adjust the size and number of each part of this mesh.
Most details come down to one variable each so that it can easily be adjusted.
The cliffs are generated from a spline directly in the Unreal editor.
This is a tool I made that works with the Houdini plugin for Unreal to generate cliffs. It could easily be adjusted to a more realistic look.
The ground is a digital assets which uses custom inputs from unreal to merge better with the environment assets. For this scene I use the pillars so that I get a zone with no noise from the dunes, and also some difference in height where they touch.
Example of how the ground is pushed up where it meets other assets.
The skull and bone were sculpted in VR using Adobe Medium. They where then imported in Houdini where I modeling the other props, again in a non-destructive way, and set up the UVs so they use only one material. I was then baked in Substance Painter.