Setting Up Procedural Lofoten-Inspired Lake House in Houdini

Introduction

My name is Abdullah Ahmed, I am a 3D environment generalist located in Egypt. I graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at Helwan University as a mechatronic engineer back in 2016. In the same year, I decided to follow my passion and start my career as a 3D environment artist.

Here is a reel video of some of the projects I have worked on in the last two years:

The Procedural Norway Lake House Project

I used a lot of software for layout, modeling, lookdev, lighting, and rendering, but I always miss some features that could help me reduce the time of iterations and edits, so I decided to start learning Houdini and the magic of proceduralism.

Most of the time my main learning sources are YouTube tutorials, SideFX's learning channel, and forums.

I started gathering reference images of lake houses; my main references were images of Lofoten houses in Norway.

Then I started thinking about the initial and most important step, which was specifying the parameters and controls I would expose to the final user and starting to build my hierarchy based on those specifications.

I divided the house into four main parts: roof, main body, base, and poles. I started from the main body and then dug into the other parts.

Having a programming background (C and Python) helps me to heavily depend on VEX. VEX gives me more powerful control over the regular nodes in many situations from simple few lines of codes to complex vector math and algorithms and of course better performance.

After I finished the model, I started with procedural UVs and then selected some seamless textures.

I started importing every part into Solaris and then applied procedural shading using Karma, procedural noises, and some attributes I created while modeling. Then I rendered it using Karma XPU, which is pretty fast.

Conclusion

There were a few challenges in this project, one of the biggest was keeping every algorithm working while the house was changing its direction or while the terrain was changing its height.

Abdullah Ahmed, Environment Generalist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine