This is a personal project I took on to explore the possibilities of procedural asset creation. In the past year, I’ve been diving a lot deeper into tool building in Houdini and this is a culmination of the skills I have picked up along that journey. An important part of this project was making everything as interconnected and procedural as possible without sacrificing quality or detail.

This tool is built on a curve-based system that takes a user-generated curve and displays to the artists all the necessary controls they need to art-direct the look of the creature. Visual indicators, such as the black sections of the mesh in the video to the right, give the artist a clear vision of how the creature will look before they cook the final geometry.

Procedural texturing is a necessary part of this tool as well. All the texture data is generated inside of VOPS and stored as point data which is accessed by RedShift to generate the color, roughness, and displacement maps.