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Voxel Terrain

Come fly with me

Inspired by an image I found on Reddit of a voxelized terrain, I wanted to have a go at creating a similar scene in Houdini making use of the terrain generation tools and volumes.

I created the main ground shape using the terrain generation tools. I was under the impression that I wouldn’t have to worry too much about high levels of detail as I thought they would get lost once I voxelized the terrain, but I soon realized that they did in fact translate very nicely so I was able to increase the resolution of the base mesh.

It was actually relatively simple to create the voxelation effect, by simply converting the geometry to a series of uniform points. I was then able to copy basic cubes onto the uniform points. Also, to massively reduce computation time, you can just instance geometry onto the points. I did this by exporting the basic cube as a Redshift proxy file and directing the renderer to instance it from disk onto the geometry points.

I thought it would be quite interesting to generate and scatter some clouds into the scene to have a nice contrast between the blocky low resolution environment and some more organic highly detailed clouds. I then went one step further by modeling a very basic plane shape, putting it through the voxelization system and adding a small pyro simulation for the engine trials. This worked out nicely in the render as it adds a bit of life to the shot.

Below is an image of the scene before getting the voxel treatment, I would have included an image of the point cloud, but at 1.8 million points it was a little hard to actually look at!

As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!