Week 1

• This week we went through the basics of Houdini interface and tools. Then we did procedural modeling to create a tower.

Creating the first floor

We started by creating a tube and setting the height and width for the first floor. Then in the rows and columns we set the amount of bricks the floor will have. We then used the node facet to separate the primitives from each other so they don’t stick together. Then in the primitive properties we scaled the primitives down so there was some gap between them. We then used start/end to create a group by range. In the end we used an expression to grab the number of primitives that comes from the input so the group was set to a range between 0 and the amount of primitives. The expression allows for us to go back and change the amount and everything updates as we go procedurally. Then we connected the range filter to the amount of columns in the tube node with expressions. Then we set it to pick every third row. This was then group row1. We did the exact same thing for row2 but connected it to the columns to offset it so we got a different row from the first one. Then we used transform to rotate these so the bricks weren’t aligned on top of each other. Then we extruded them to give them depth.

We converted the bricks into a VDB, and then we took an extruded version of the original tube and turned that into a VDB as well. Then we used VDB combine to calculate the difference between the two to fill the gap. Then converted that into a polygon.

Stairs

For the stairs we used a spiral and adjusted it to fit around the wall. Then we extruded that out from the wall. Then in the group range we selected every other primitive for the group. Then we deleted that group in the delete node. In the primitive properties we scaled the y axis down to zero to flatten the stairs. Then we extruded the stairs downwards.