gnarly wood generator (Houdini)
A gnarly wood generator, makes stylized mid-poly wood shapes - fast! Mesh & Texture Generated 100% in Houdini.
Started as an experiment using PolySlice to generate interesting wood shapes, then became an opportunity to try out COPS in Houdini for texturing. Doing both geometry and texture in Houdini allows the texture to be generated along with the geo, so they match up very well.
The main trick is using PolySlice & Booleans. No volumes or remeshing to slow it down, takes only a few seconds to generate small pieces geo, then a few more seconds for the texture map. Textured using COPs using the same slices (and additional slicing for details like grain lines)
The geometry & textures are all shown exactly how they come from houdini, no clean up or poly reductions (yet).
Made over the last week, I would call this version 0.1 prototoype. More to come!
Early test render
Some cool ones generated while developing (viewport screengrabs collage)
More early viewport grabs
Some other weird ones
Untextured
Example wireframe. Geometry comes out pretty clean, not perfect but very usable! This is with no poly reducing to preserve the sharpness of the original cuts as much as possible.
The various masks generated in Houdini (COPs) that generate the final texture
A video showing some of the parameters and real time speed of the tool
Base mesh -> Polyslice -> Sweep Tubes -> Boolean Subtract -> Vertex Color -> Generate Texture
Shapes: Box, Cylinder, Spline, Tree Trunk - the slices can follow the flow of the surface based on the UVs for bent shapes like trees and roots