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In normal way, we can use following code to operate layers in heightfield. @height += 0.5; @mask = 1; But how to access layer info through variable? string layer_name = "height"; @layer_name = 1; // doesn't work Thanks.

The erosion node is the last on the network graph and every time I reopen the file everything starts recalculating. I've already frozen the erosion node on the frame I want, but I would like to store the result of the node on disc and reload it to continue from there. Any idea which node to use to cache the erosion? (up till now the terrain is a volume, not yet converted to polygons.

Is it possible in Houdini to export the terrain mesh in tiles?

I draw a mask, but I need to be precise, I cover more than I need and I need to erase part of the mask, how do I erase just the extra part (turn the brush into eraser)?

Dear community, I am currently playing around with heightfields in H17 and would like to create a little island for Unreal or Unity3D. I am using the erosion filter to generate shape-features as well as water and debris masks. I really like the distribution of water areas for rivers and lakes. However, except for distributing fluid-particles around these regions and performing heavy simulations which I could bake to meshes, I am out of ideas. Especially in non-planar areas I don't know any technique that would create realistic water surfaces. For a game-engine I would usually just need the top surface parts of the water. Does anybody have an idea on how to achieve that? I am thankful for any feasible approach or idea. Best wishes, Nicolas

Hi, something happened to my heightfields(or Houdini) now I see them as flat rectangles with displacement texture. (I can see my heightfield/terrain in 'no_lights', but if I switch to any other light mode it is flat) How can I undo that? ps: If I convert it by 'Heightfield_Convert' it works though

How do I get out as an image the texture I created with heightfield quickshade?

Just the default terrain of Houdini default erosion, increased resolution to 4k, exported and I get consistently (3 times) pixelated lines in the heightfield, I can see them when I import in any software (World Machine...) I attach the file and the heightfield output. Do you get the same thing? terrain exports ugly pixelated lines.hiplc

Can I create or import a rectangular heightfield and export it as a rectangle not a square?

Tried to export a heightfield of a terrain in greyscale using cop2net and sop import but I get individual elements (height, water, debris, sediment...). 1. How do I get the full terrain out of it? 2. How do I even get these individual elements out? You've guessed it, I'm new to Houdini.

I'm meddling with Heightfields and one thing that seems to be missing int the workflow and amazed me in 3DSMax Forest plugin is the convert masks to curves. Is there a way to create isolines in Houdini from either @height or @mask? I'm looking into creating road/river/track networks into terrain so if there's any good reference to follow let me know, thanks. For now I'm just generating them irrespective of the heightfield.

Hi, Im new to Arnold for Houdini and was wondering why Heightfields do not render inside Arnold. Do I realy need to convert them? Also packet primitives doesnt seems to work. Are there any work arounds if you need to scatter alot of vegetation? Thnx

Workflow for creating terrain I am trying to create a realistic mountain terrain, but I can't find many resources on it. There is Alex Dracott's "Generating HeightField Terrain Textures" and "GDC 2017 - Houdini 16 Terrain Tools" but it leaves me with some questions that you guys maybe have the answer to. When I look at Alex Dracott, and other artists terrains, it looks like the vertical side of the mountains is texturered very nice, but how is this possible? The vertical sides of a hightfield will always have very low resolution, because the UV's a projected down on the surface in the Y direction. One though I had, was to create the UV's based on the quads that make up the heightfield, but this will involve some kind of remeshing, because the mesh also are scaled (Stretched). Extreme example of UV stretching <stretched_uvs.PNG> Another thing is the texturing. In Alex Dracott's video, he uses cop to create colored noise from masks and applies them back as textures, but what is the practice for texturing a big terrain with textures/materials? I have been playing around with substance painter, and projection, to "draw" materials, is there another way? Is it normal to export the heightfield mask and generate materials in a more procedural way via substance designer, for these big areas, or it more common to create the material from scratch without any masks in something like substance designer? And last, is it normal to create some kind of LOD system for such a project, or using UDIMS, to get the details we want when getting near curtain areas of the terrain? Maybe I am lost, and not even near what a real world workflow looks like, but I am sure that someone on the forum has experience with this.

Is it possible to create a custom heightfield mask with my own name? It seems to me that only the predefined mask names (mask, height, water, debris...) is possible to reference, when working with heightfields? If I wanna create 3-4 different grass masks, for texture splat mapping later, it would be nice to be able to create these mask (grassMask1, grassMask2....) It's going to be used for working with them in COP, but also export them, for later use when create the final materials

Hey there. I am trying to read a heightmap, do some changes to a specific area and then write it back out again. I am making it a specific area because an 8x8k heightfield seems a bit too heavy. Unfortunately, when trying to use a Composite COP Node to compose the changed area back on the original image, it leaves big black bars, freezes Houdini, or just instantly kills Houdini. On trying to export it all with the ROP File Output node, it just g ives a bake error. Could anyone have a quick peek and see if there is something obviously wrong with my setup? I imagine it is because I am new to the program and am doing something fundamentally wrong with the way I build graphs. The attached HDA needs a heightmap and that's about it. The Composite node is in [HDA]/TerrainTileOut/Output_Texture/ where it's the second last node. Thanks. Terrain_Spawner.hda

Hi, I'm trying to create a terrain, which I will probably export as .hda in UE4. At the moment I want to apply a material to this heightfield, where for each layer mask I want to apply textures and additive color layers, or more materials with relative textures for each mask (for example. slope mask-> material with texture1(base color, specular, roughness), curvature mask -> material2 with texture2(base color, specular, roughness) etc...). I tried to: - use the heightfield_quickshade node, but it allows me to add only four textures; I tryed to create two heightfield_quickshade node but I can't merge these nodes; - use more materials but I don't know to associate them all at the same heightfield; Can someone help me to understand or give an example of how I can associate these masks with more than four textures which include(specular, roughness, normal...) and in case other masks as additive color layers, please? I attached my file Heightfield_UE4.hipnc

Hey, I am using a heightfield as a collision. However, when I try to view the collision by turning on show guide geometry, nothing shows. Is this normal? I want to point out that the collision works, I just cant see it. thanks

Hi, In building a terrain, I used Entagma's tutorial on live rendering of Heightfields in Houdini using Redshift: The issue I'm running into is that my UV's are now super stretched on the terrain from using displacement on a grid. My terrain is huge, like 8,600 units across square. If I convert to polygons, it's pretty heavy. I'm trying to figure out the best workflow that will allow me to have the detail I need, but not be so polygon heavy. Would exporting out some lower resolution geo for rendering along with a baked displacement map be a good option? I need to be able to somehow edit the UVs as well so they are not stretched on my terrain texture. Any help would be appreciated. Jim

Hi, I have my heightfield exporting from Houdini into Unreal without any issues, but I can't seem to find any info on how to export the landscape holes. I can set the hole material, but not the actual hole itself. Does anyone know how, or can point me in the right direction? Thanks, Dave

Hi - I'm struggling to find a tutorial that explains the workflow for exporting a large heightfield terrain as tiles. I'm unsure where I would use a tilesplit/splice node for example - before or after my erode node? If I have a large terrain with many voxels, the erode takes a lot of memory. Can I use a tile split node before the erode to make the computation less demanding per tile, and somehow iterate over the individual tiles, exporting each tile's maps along the way? If I try to compute the erode on a very large terrain all at once, my pc runs out of memory. I would really appreciate any tips, links or advice you might be able to offer on appropriate workflows for working with large terrains and exporting tiled maps. Thank you Bryan

Hi I am trying to create a Heightfield Terrain with a single Hi-Res tile closest to the camera and as it is Houdini do this in a procedural way so that the tile can be changed dynamically, maybe linked to the camera. I am investigating doing this through a 'for each loop' but if there is an easier way I would love to know. The crop tool and the tile tools seem to be lacking an inverse toggle? I have probably missed something simple but if I work it out first I'll post the file for others anyway. It seems to me to be a useful workflow technique.