Create Your Own Sand Dunes in Houdini with Dune Solver

Barrett Meeker, a Creative Director at Lucky Pause and Developer of puzzle-exploration game Homesick, has released a new tool for Houdini called Dune Solver. This is a natural dune solver for Houdini Heightfields and Terrain tools that simulates the ways real sand dunes form based on wind, sand depth, and other factors. This solver is written in OpenCL and makes full use of your GPU making it extremely fast.

The Dune Solver system for Houdini is based on the last research into sand dune formations. Each sand voxel is simulated simultaneously and the dunes themselves can even feedback into the wind patterns that create them.

The solver uses a bedrock + sand = height model where the sand layer stores sand height at each voxel and this is the layer that is simulated. A vector wind layer is used for wind direction so wind direction can be set on a per voxel level. The Y-axis (vertical) of wind is ignored

Learn more about the tool and try it for free by clicking this link. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.