Houdini procedural refinement

[david.norlin]

Greetings,

We are looking to use Houdini for procedural refinement of our 30m DEM data sources.  Are there any good resources available that show before-after shots of the Houdini Engine plugin in action?  

Also, is this compatible with "global" terrain?  We would like to build a roughly 600x800km swath of terrain, or is Houdini refinement suitable for only small terrain sizes?  Any further information would be helpful.

On perhaps a different (but related) note, is Houdini the best way to go about this?  We'd like to create high quality terrain but at this time, anything lower than 30m is a bit cost prohibitive, so we're doing the best with what we have.  Any tips or tricks would be great.
 

Thanks

[morbid]

Hello David,

right now we can't provide you with screenshots that demonstrate the quality of height map refinement. But you can check SDK 2.6  notes in devlog for screens with improved details for TerrainGlobal (Just scroll down to a neat image switcher). In general, Houdini assets could be used both for elevation (height) modification and for mask refinement. Such masks could be used for terrain details.

11 hours ago, david.norlin said:

is Houdini refinement suitable for only small terrain sizes

Procedural refinement increases the time required for terrain generation. You can use it even for 600*800km terrain but it's hard to predict how many hours will be spent on this. However, you can use distributed computing for this task.

11 hours ago, david.norlin said:

is Houdini the best way to go about this

If you want to refine geo data - I'd say yes. If you don't need georeferenced terrain you can switch to flat mode in Landscape Tool and use pre-generated raster files from other software.

Here you can find some more on Houdini workflow and sample .hda files that we used in our projects.

Thanks!

[david.norlin]

Morbid,

Thank you for your reply.   This does shed a little light on the situation, but I have read the documentation several times now, and one thing I am quite confused about is how Houdini assets are handled.  

Also, there is this line in the documentation:

Quote

• Basic workflow (described below): you have a Houdini digital asset (a set of assets) included in the UNIGINE SDK that performs all necessary data refinement.

What does this mean?  Is there some kind of generic "refinement" .hda already within the SDK that we can use?   Is it simply a matter of specifying that as the procedural data source?   If so, how do we know what specific parts of the terrain it affects?  Geometry or textures, or is the plugin integration such that it is actually what the Houdini asset is? 

It seems as though there are a vast array of different types of assets Houdini can output.  How do we know what works with the landscape tool?  Aside from Houdini, one of our biggest points of confusion at the moment is how to work with masks.  If we use Houdini to generate landcover masks, how do we then place it according to the correct DSM/DEM data source?  As you might expect, for a 600*800 terrain area, there will be many DSM tiles...does this mean we also have a corresponding number of .hda's to generate?  

Sorry for all the questions.  We are in an evaluation period and some of these workflows are unfamiliar to us.  Do you have any Unigine-specific videos for Houdini refinement?

Thanks!

[morbid]

12 hours ago, david.norlin said:

What does this mean?  Is there some kind of generic "refinement" .hda already within the SDK that we can use?

I'm afraid that this quote from documentation could be a mistake. Earlier we had plans to supply users with "basic" Houdini digital assets but eventually refused from this. There's no any generic or out of the box type of refinement.

12 hours ago, david.norlin said:

It seems as though there are a vast array of different types of assets Houdini can output.  How do we know what works with the landscape tool?

Okay, so, how data is being processed:

• You import georeferenced or simply raster sources into landscape tool
• Landscape creates cache data for these sources
• Houdini Engine uses this cache as input data and creates modified (with refined data) cache
• New cache is used by Landscape for terrain generation

 

For now, we can work only with heightfield volume exported from Houdini. This is the main requirement for your Houdini assets. Please check attached .hda files in Houdini FX. This should help to understand the asset structure and import\export features.

12 hours ago, david.norlin said:

does this mean we also have a corresponding number of .hda's to generate?

Nope, you don't have to. You can create as many hda as you want, but plenty of them could be confusing during landscape project setup.

I understand that Houdini is a really complicated thing. If something is still unclear for you - please post your questions.

Thanks!

terrain_ref_itsec.hda

condense.hda