SSX, however, didn’t get a sequel, but I ended up working on FIFA, NHL, Madden, NBA and more,

doing procedural helmets for characters, characters scanning, crowd systems, photogrammetry for characters, and, finally, modeling tools for Need for Speed Payback. I had a great time there and my great colleagues Caleb Howard, Ivan DeWolf, and Bryn Wyka and many more, they all taught me so much.

I could keep talking for days, but this is probably already way too long, so let’s get to the rest of your questions!

Houdini Advantages

80.lv: Could you talk about the way the procedural nature of Houdini proves to be so interesting for the game developers? What are the elements and tools, which you think show the biggest interest for the users?

One of the biggest things that make Houdini interesting for the game developers is the ability to solve problems of scale and deal with things that are simply too great in number to do by hand or that require a lot of precision, especially in combination with tedious repetitive work which will bore people and make them make mistakes. A good example of this was the helmet fitting I mentioned above. When you are a company like EA and you have thousands of character over multiple franchises that wear different types of helmets it can save a LOT of time to do that automatically. Suppose there are 2000 heads and 8 different helmets with 3 different sizes each, that’s 16000 helmets to place… now imagine also having to fit the strap and heads being improved all the time, meaning they need to be re-fit continuously. That’s a job that costs a lot of time artists could have spent on actually making the game look better, so our system did it in an hour or so whenever required.

Complex Level Generation

80.lv: Let’s talk about the generation of the levels with Houdini. This package provides some amazing landscape generation tech, and we’re interested in the way you suggest using these tools for the generation of the game worlds of a more complex nature. How does that actually work and what way can a person with little Houdini knowledge approach this task?

When it comes to the complex level that includes anything from mountains and dungeons to corridors and interiors – keep in mind that if you can think of it, Houdini can make it. Houdini basically just wants you to store all the steps and then give it the input to work on. Let take a road: the simplest input might be a curve, and then we tell Houdini the steps to go from that curve to a road. And that is basically a lofting operation. We probably want to do some smarter things like automatically UVing that road or have some controls over something like the number of potholes on them but the principle is the same. Let’s take another example of a building: if you make the basic shape, we can divide that shape into tiles of wall segments, and place those instead of the simple box you gave as an input. Now if you were to make a dungeon, you would start with a simple layout polygon of the floors, allowing Houdini to add the walls and detailing with maybe tiles for hard walls and procedural rock generation where it’s more organic.

It’s really not that hard once you learn how to break a problem down into its most basic steps.

Always think of it this way: what is the simplest basic representation of an object, its simplest form and how would I add all the detail to reach the highest detail? How can I make rules to go from A to B?

I usually start to show Houdini with these simple setups: grid – paint – node – scatter (set to use color for density) – copy_to_points. This setup places objects (that you input into the copy) onto the points that get scattered where you paint a brighter color. This simplified option can be easily extended. Instead of painting the color you can calculate, say, how much light an area receives. and grow plants based on that amount. It’s all just numbers. It doesn’t matter whether I or some other process does it. What matters is that the right value is placed in the right spot.

I decided to make a simple scene to explain how this works.