The Gnomon Workshop – Introduction To The Houdini Ocean Toolset

Creating a large ocean simulation doesn’t need to be daunting. This 3.5-hour introductory workshop by Danny Barnhart provides an overview of the Ocean Toolset in Houdini and reveals how to bring your own ocean environments to life. He talks through the basics of using ocean spectrums and how each parameter relates to the resulting animated ocean surface, beginning by creating a large ocean surface to show how to layer a variety of spectrum patterns as well as how to create custom masks and instanced waves. Once the desired ocean movement is achieved, Danny starts incorporating simple environment geometry to add interest and scale to the scene before delving into simulating surface foam.

The following project takes the large ocean scene and transitions to a close-up shot that incorporates a FLIP fluid simulation. You’ll discover how to bring in your ocean spectrums and create custom waves to drive your FLIP simulation. Once the FLIP simulation is cached out, Danny discusses how to mesh and extend the simulation, as well as how to create additional ocean spray for the final effect. As the last step, you’ll see how to set up some basic lighting and tweak the ocean shaders in Houdini to render out the two project scenes in Mantra, Houdini’s rendering engine.

By completing this workshop, you’ll have a sound knowledge of the Houdini Ocean Toolset and an understanding of how to customize ocean spectra to create a variety of ocean movements for your future projects.

Project files are available with this workshop, including the Houdini scene file with the final node setup for each lesson, along with the palm tree model used in the creation of the scene.