Here’s my HDA submission for SideFX’s H20 Tech Art Challenge in the Game Art Asset category.
Overview
I created a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) that generates procedural water lily ponds.
This tool is made to be used in Houdini and is intended for environment artists or modelers working on animations/games that involve building water gardens.
With controls to adjust the dimensions, wall, rocks, and vegetation of the pond, the tool provides artists with control over key elements of the pond (e.g. water lily bloom rate, roundness of rocks, lily pad opening angles). The tool also utilizes VEX and SOPs to streamline the process of putting the entire pond together (i.e. combining petals to make flowers, overlapping lily pads, assembling clumps of pond grass).
Geometrically modeling aesthetic vegetation is always a hassle, so I hope this tool can help to create water lily pond scenes (or at least flowers and plant clumps) that suit the needs of the artists, whether they are taking into account the pond’s setting or season.
In preparation to create the tool, I observed and sketched various water lily ponds in the parks of my hometown, Miami.
I was specifically inspired by the water gardens in Fairchild Botanical Gardens.
Koi Animation
