Cinque Terre Inspired Terrain

This is a little scene I did in Houdini inspired by the Cinque Terre. I wanted to make a little scene coming out of a storybook page, so I took inspiration from handmade miniatures and children’s toys.

Overall this was super fun because I wasn’t focused on making a fully procedural tool, so instead got to experiment with a lot of new Houdini functions like height fields and the scatter and align node.

I haven’t totally finished it, but I’ve put it on hold for now to focus on other projects. I’m hoping to come back to this project sometime properly shade it and animate it to emerge out of a book page.

I have a little breakdown of my procedural modeling process below.

Base Terrain

I started by blocking out the overall terrain shape with primitives and projecting it onto a height field.

Then I added some noise to give the terrain some texture.

I drew a mask and used a height field flatten node to carve away terrain where I wanted cliffs. I also used a slump node to make the terrain look like it eroded over time.

I gave the terrain a circular cutout shape in a wrangle. Then I used attributes created by the slump node to shade the terrain, placing sand, grass, and dirt in a believable way.

Cliffs and Water

I created the base for the cliffs by scattering boxes on the cliffs from the base terrain

Jittering, remeshing, and smoothing them gave a slightly more realistic rock base.

Some transformations and additional smoothing and noise gave it a cute hand sculpted look.

Lastly, added sin wave based displacement to a disk to create water.

Details

First, I combined the water, cliffs, and base terrain.

Then I scattered trees onto the base terrain. I used attributes from the slump node to make sure trees were scattered logically (on places where the terrain wasn’t too steep or sandy)

Then I used the scatter and align node to place buildings in a non-intersecting way around the trees. I used the same process to place non-intersecting boats on the water.