Modeling

There’s a cool Interactive Modeling tool called PolyDraw, which lets you use the interactive “TopoBuild” tools anywhere in your scene, free from dense reference geometry. There is also fast construction plane alignment and positioning, rotation snapping, view and construction plane memories, and new geometry alignment tools.

Terrain Tools: Erosion, Improved Scattering

Terrain tools got a new update as well, with realistic erosion, tectonic distortion and collision-aware multi-scattering. Houdini had erosion in the original release of the Terrain tools, but it tended to give soft results. For Houdini 17, they have rewritten the erosion simulation from scratch, providing better detail with far fewer iterations. You can use this solver to generate all kinds of erosions: wide rivers, fluvial lines, river banks and debris.

Houdini 17 also has a new set of tools, which lets you modify terrain in different ways. This feature is called the Smear Mode. It’s very neat to use for the creation of sharp peaks, or some places where you need to tweak the geometry of your landscape. There’s also a swirl mode, which is exactly what is sounds like: you basically twist your mountains, swirl them a bit to give the landscape even more variety. This works great for different stylized terrains with high detail.

Scattering was also significantly improved, which is especially useful for gamedev. Single scattering allows locking items in the terrain, so they don’t move randomly – providing designers more control. SideFX has also introduced Hierarchical Scattering. This is probably the feature that world-builders at Ubisoft, Insomniac and environment artists at large are going to appreciate. Now Houdini places objects much more organically and intelligently, which helps to achieve more realistic landscapes. No overlaps, everything is logical and structured.

Better UVs

UVs are a necessary evil, but you do need them. Houdini tries to solve this problem in a way with a node called UV Autoseam. It generates the seams for you by analyzing the mesh and finding the locally flat areas. Once you get the edges you can then feed them to the UV Flatten node. So far most of the examples shown were hard surface, so we’re still waiting to see how it works with something more organic.