In part 2 of the desert environment tutorial, I will be continuing where we left off in Gaea. At this point, it will be about nailing the general mask shapes we created in part 1, adding the details to the surfaces, and exporting our texture maps for both heightfields and masking inside of Houdini & Redshift. I will also show you how to fix some common issues that can happen with sharp shapes like the sand dune peaks.
Once everything is exported I show you a few simple techniques using VOPs in combination with Houdini's Heightfield tools to create sharp "crest" shapes for sand dunes inside of Houdini. The Houdini heightfield tools have a lot of great features and are open to all the noises available to Houdini through VOPs. While I don't use this directly I wanted to cover it briefly. In the end, I will be using the Gaea output in combination with Houdini's Heightfield tools.
Near the end, I did a quick Redshift test render and setup some lighting to see if the general shapes we created looked correct as light and shadow are critical for the sand dunes. This is a solid foundation to continue onto the next stages of our project to further detail, scatter and begin shading the terrain in the next tutorial. Thanks again for all the support and have a great day!