Breakdown
It all started with a grid…
My Struggle
I make Houdini tutorials on my small Youtube channel and I cover a wide variety of topics, so Vellum Grains was something on the list of things to do on my never ending Houdini journey. Heightfields in Houdini was never new to me, I started learning it awhile back, but I could never render & shade it with good results. I recently peaked interest in Substance and decided to give this a try to solve my issue.
I first started out with Designer before, but that is quite difficult to use. So Painter was the next one on the list.
Masking with Images
Heightfield Cliffs Layer Mask generated in Houdini
I used the masks generated from the Heightfields and ported them over to Painter. The purpose of this exercise was to develop a workflow between Houdini and Substance Painter. This was my 1st project using Painter, well technically it is the 2nd one because I did a Rubber Toy test before this one.
So I struggled for a long time with the Heightfields in Houdini not rendering out with the quality I would be satisfied with, and this is what drove me to develop a workflow between Substance and Houdini.
Animation Requirement
First Draft of Vellum Grains in Houdini
I was about to submit my challenge and decided to rewatched your challenge video just in case I missed something and realized that one of the requirements was an animation. So I decided to do a Vellum Grains simulation on top of my terrain. Because I never used Vellum Grains, so this was the perfect opportunity.
A few months ago, I received a huge refund from Quixel, because they got bought by Epic Games, but the money was refunded to my Paypal account and what was I suppose to do with that? It must have been fate or something because at the same time CG Circuit had a huge sale, so I bought this Vellum Grains tutorial at the time, but I never got around to watching it. I just bought it because it was on sale and I knew I would need it sooner or later.
This project gave me the incentive to start Vellum Grains. And that's why I added the Grains simulation.
Breakdown
I created a breakdown of work process on the scene, which is posted on 4̶ ̶b̶l̶o̶g̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶t̶s̶ 5 blog posts, because I did this on and off throughout the month. The 4 links to the posts are listed below:
