Procedural Trees with Houdini

Here is a tool I made in Houdini for quickly creating procedural real time trees.

Well, semi-procedural, since you paint the silhouette in Houdini. Everything is done with 3 different tools I've made. I'm using the Quixel live link to get leaf and branch assets directly into Houdini where the first tool creates highres and lowres versions of the branch cards. I bake it all down in Marmoset where I use the live link to get the materials instantly from Megascans. Then back in Houdini, I draw up the silhouette of the tree in 2d, before the last tool creates a tree from those splines with UVs. Then the leaf cards gets scattered on the branches before it preps the tree with Unreal's pivot painter setup, for a more natural wind movement. Next up is just importing it to Unreal, I use the live link here as well to get some the textures setup quickly.

I start off creating the vegetation cards with the first tool I made. It basically scatters one object on another. The tool creates high and low polys that I bake with Marmoset. I use the new Quixel live link for both!

For the tree itself I draw the shape of it with splines in 2d, before the tool starts rotating things around and drapes a mesh with UVs around them. Then scatters the tree cards that was made earlier.

Create multiple variations in minutes!

Here is the pivot painter setup in action, with no tweaking on the mesh itself needed. All the settings can be tweaked in the materials