Waterfall.png

Waterfall

Paradise Falls

One of the first solo projects I worked on after finishing my Masters. This procedural waterfall can be adjusted to create almost limitless variations which will all end up working with a nice water / particle simulation with little to no tweaking to get a great result.

There were two things I wanted to achieve with this little project. Firstly I wanted to create a simple system for producing a procedural waterfall terrain and secondly I wanted to use a particle system to create a waterfall automatically from the underlying terrain.

The first step was achieved by creating a tool that allows me to edit the base shape of the terrain based on a curve graph. This low-poly grid is then fed into a VOP that allows me to edit various parameters for creating randomized displacement on the grid that generate imperfections such as rocks and gullies for the water to run over and through respectively. The noise and displacement attributes are fed into a system that adds material values to the geometry.

I tried a second technique for creating the waterfall using Houdini's terrain tools. Although this isn’t quite what they’re designed for at this scale, I did manage to get some good results.

For the waterfall, I isolate the very top of the grid and turn the isolated geometry into a particle emitter. A force vector sends the resulting particles down the waterfall.

Because of the procedural nature of the terrain generation, whatever shape I come up with for the underlying geometry, the particle system is able to be re-run without having to change any of the initial parameters.

I chose not to mesh the water particles together as I liked the look of the fine spray. The motion blur on the particle layer helps to blend the particles together and really sell the look.

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