Procedural Modelling: Coral

Development of a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) to populate a rock formation with coral.

This particular HDA focuses on providing versatile user control of the coral types throughout the rock. A noise option can be enabled to auto-populate the coral types throughout based on the noise parameters and a random seed. An alternative option in the controls provides the user the opportunity to manually paint each type of coral for managed art direction. This manual painting option was enabled through the programming of Python states in Houdini.

To further optimize the workflow, a wireframe mode can be enabled to expedite the auto-population and painting of coral without the potential lag of the instanced high-poly assets. Once the placement is defined, the high-poly assets can be re-enabled for rendering or other operations throughout the pipeline.

Individual coral types generated in Houdini through a previous CGMA course project and used in this HDA as instanced assets.