This is the first part in a series of blog posts that I'll be doing about a tool that I've spent the last 6 months developing in Houdini.

I've been learning Houdini for about a year and a half. I started out by following tonnes of tutorials by Dokai and Entagma, and gradually grew from there.

As someone who's primary focus is environments, and as someone who approaches environments from a more technical point of view, I like to have a high degree of control over as a many aspects of production as possible. And I dislike 'black-box' approaches and tools.

After trying a few different tree creation packages and solutions, I was frustrated by the lack of end to end support in most packages - and disliked several aspects of the most popular software, Speedtree, which, while being incredibly feature rich, and well supported across different game engines, has the 'black-box' problem i mentioned previously. I wanted more control over things like Lod creation, wind, uv's and incorporating photoscanned data into procedural systems.

Houdini is a unique software, in that it is possible to build entire tools and workflows in it - with minimal amounts of programming. So this series of blog posts is going to focus on how I've done just that, and built a fully featured tree creation suite inside of Houdini.

The tool is still a WIP, so there are some funky things going on in certain places, but these kinks are being ironed out, and will be dealt with by the time I finish writing this series of blog posts.