The Gnomon Workshop – 3D Landscapes with Houdini and Clarisse

In this tutorial, Generalist James Miller takes an in-depth look at designing, lighting and compositing a landscape environment from beginning to end. Starting with Houdini's terrain tools, he builds up the landscape to fit the desired natural formations taken from photo reference. Following this, he imports this asset into Clarisse and takes a look into project construction, material building, and asset importing. Once this is all set up, he continues by laying out and lighting the shot, creating and animating a camera, and exploring the different ways we can view our shot in the package. For the cloud volumes, James goes back into Houdini and covers Volume VOPS to helps build the atmosphere, before returning to Clarisse to lay out these new assets for the render. The render is then taken into Nuke, where he explores relighting using AOVs, creating gizmos, building a skydome, and installing & using the p_world tools for matte work.

The goal of this tutorial is to take you through all the steps involved in a large environment build of a mountain landscape, and how they all link together, so you can experiment, play, and enjoy building up your own shots from beginning to end.