Houdini Desert Flora - Open Sourced HDAs

During my time at Mythica, I developed quite a number of procedural tools. Our philosophy was that anything we made that wasn't directly for a client, we would open source. This is the first in a series of posts where I share a bit about the various Houdini tools I developed.

This first set of tools is a collection of digital assets for creating various desert flora, in stylized and non-stylized looks.

You can download the HDAs from github here: https://github.com/Supertorio-Games/Procedural-Desert-Plant-Life

Included in the repo are several different digital assets.

First up a classic Saguaro Cactus. This digital asset supports both low and high poly stylization. It has built in sub tools for the spines and optional flowers, but also allows for the input of custom geometry or tools for those features.

Next up is the succulent system. This is a modular system that allows you to use a base succulent tool in combination with another tool or even custom geometry specifying the leaves of the plant. For ease of use, I've also created complete tools for the agave and aloe plants.

Here are some further examples of what these tools can accomplish.

As part of the integration with Unity, I also set up a couple of Houdini workflows to create variations as well as build and pack LODS as part of an FBX output.

And finally we have the stylised cactus assets. These two are more niche but still quite fun.

I hope you find these tools useful. And if you do use them in a project, please let me know, I'd love to see what you've made!

Extra thought: There's one more tool in the repo, for an optunia (more commonly known as a prickly pear) cactus. I didn't highlight that particular tool in this post as it still needs quite a bit of work. But it's included in the repo in case it's useful to someone as a starting point.