Project Elderwood

SideFX Project Elderwood

I was the team lead on this project. Elderwood was an ambitious undertaking which ultimately fell short of its potential after spending too long in development. This was partially due to immature tools, but also because I specified an unclear brief and allowed the scope to change and creep during production.

Nonetheless, Elderwood showcases interoperability between Houdini and Unreal Engine using Digital Assets, Editor Utility Widgets and Scriptable Tools, and the project utilized the Natsura houdini foliage plugin which I co-developed with Feike Postmes, all of the plants were created using this system.

I also scanned all of the terrain textures and processed them using COPS in houdini to create tilable physically based materials, and came up with a novel-ish approach to generated boulders and cliffs using a clustering algorithm and the new "inflate" node in H20.5.