Day 41

At about midnight I've suddenly realized something about the rock generation.

I had issues before, regarding the use of my own modelled base meshes and applying vopsop on it.

The way to counter this problem is really simple, I wish I had seen through this earlier.

First, I just created a cube in maya with a few subdivisions (I made it as simple as possible). As you can see it's just a simple arc-shaped polygon. All I did was move a few vertices here and there and it's done. After that I exported the geometry out as obj format.

Next, I imported the low-poly arc geometry into houdini, subdivided it and plugged it into the vopsop which I had prepared earlier (See day 40 for my vopsop walkthrough). With that I got an arc-shaped looking rock. It's not perfect yet but it's a start.

The main idea is to get the right amount of subdivisions for the base geometry no matter what shape it is. I try to make the low-poly meshes with as few subdivisions as possible. After that I'll increase the subdivisions using the subdivide node in houdini.

Here I'm just doing some test renders using the default stone shader provided in houdini.

I've also played around with setting up the overall terrain. It's a test first as I'm not ready with the rock generation digital asset yet.

The setting up has been going pretty fast and easy as everything is procedural. Reason is because I've installed the height map terrain digital asset and I have the rock generation vopsop node. If any changes need to be made I just need to rely on those 2 controls.

At the same time I've done a number of simple test renders.