pluralsight Procedural Cities with Houdini and Python

[johnCrief]

Just letting everyone know that there is a yet another new Houdini course on Pluralsight. Please take the time to explore the new course by Framestore FX TD Timothy Stam, Procedural Cities with Houdini and Python.

Course Link

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/houdini-python-procedural-cities

About the Course

In this course, you will learn how to tackle the problem of generating vast CG cities, making use of Python and various Houdini techniques, while maintaining artist control every step of the way. 

First, you will be introduced to Python itself, and where and how it can be used in Houdini. Next, you will learn how to populate a city plan with buildings of various types, block by block, and how to automate this using Python. Finally, Python is again used to do the heavy lifting on the skyline, building a tool that ensures artist control over the height of buildings. You will use Python to import files from disk, read from and write to files, keep track of what the set-up is doing, build node networks automatically and to develop the technology required to make this city generator work internally. 

By the end of this course, you will output a vast, automatically generated CG city, instanced upon a point cloud containing all the necessary attributes. With this knowledge, you can go big while keeping your memory footprint as small as possible.

About the Author

Timothy worked on the cities for the Yorktown sequence for Star Trek: Beyond, did a variety of FX on Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and has worked on a number of commercial projects, both doing FX and building procedural modeling tools. He studied Digital Effects at Bournemouth University and Game Art at the Utrecht School of Art & Technology and is currently an FX TD at Framestore, having worked as such before at MPC, Electric Theatre Collective and as a TD at Double Negative. 
 

[jonmoore]

This one looks interesting John.