I’ve been exploring terrain generation inside Houdini this week, pushing beyond the standard heightfield nodes. By layering custom VEX wrangles for erosion patterns and fractal displacement, I’ve managed to get a more organic feel—perfect for distant mountain vistas. One pro tip: feed a custom noise map into the erosion node to direct water flow, creating convincing channels. Next step: bringing these terrains into Blender for final texturing and lighting.
I’ve been converting my complex mechanical rigs from Maya to Blender. Surprisingly, the new rigging tools in Blender 3.0+ handle constraints and driver setups quite elegantly. For anyone transitioning, plan a consistent naming convention before you start parenting and adding IK constraints—it’ll save hours of debugging. Also, the Rigify add-on can be customized for non-human rigs if you’re willing to tweak a few Python scripts!
I dove deeper into OpenVDB workflows to streamline fluid simulations between Houdini and Blender. By exporting the sim as VDB sequences from Houdini, I can skip heavy Alembic caches and keep the file sizes more manageable. In Blender, the volume object support has opened doors to quick visualization of complex sims. However, be sure to double-check your voxel size and compression settings—overlooking them can balloon file sizes fast.
Spent the week refining a forest scene by using instancing techniques. Houdini’s point-based system makes it easy to scatter varied tree assets—complete with slight randomization in scale, rotation, and hue. After that, I hopped into Blender’s Geometry Nodes to replicate a similar approach for grass fields. By customizing geometry node groups, I could easily swap out entire sets of plants with just a few clicks. Definitely a huge time-saver for large environments!