Foliage and Tree Creator with custom masks

I've made a workflow where I utilize Houdini to create masks for various foliage types, can even have various forest types, run the masks through a script and very easily generate foliage and randomly place trees in the map in Giants Editor.

[@TheFarmSimGuy]

Just ridiculously cool, If only I had some time to commit to learning it 🙂

[@Joe6packAmerican]

Epic. Look forward to a full subscription class teaching Houdini to us from start to finish. Just pull the trigger :)

[@olahaldor]

Haha that would be a dream; teach Houdini and people would pay me to 😂

[@FarmerTaz]

Great stuff!

[@alfaunicorn81]

Kult!

[@j_rocknation]

Make this stuff look WAY too easy!!😛

[@j_rocknation]

Am curious to know how long is the process to create the individual scripts and masks to get the end results you have presented??

[@olahaldor]

There's an upfront cost of maybe 10-15 minutes setting up nodes so the masks add or subtract to one another before exporting from Houdini.
Making the selections based on height, slope, curvature and such takes seconds.
I'm looking into making a mask tool so it's literally just a single tool, with no messing with nodes all the time. It's very complex so I can't promise it'll be ready any time soon.
The manual way is the best way for now. :)
If Houdini isn't your thing, you can use Gaea, World Machine and similar as well, or even photoshop, but you'd need to figure out your own workflow in a photo editor to make natural looking masks.

[@j_rocknation]

So I suppose it's just a manner of learning Houdini to apply the scripts??@@olahaldor

[@olahaldor]

I would definitely recommend learning houdini in general. It's such a massive time saver in so many ways. Roads, terrain which adapt to the road, masking, creating fields and field definitions based on orthophotos, various ways of placing trees and rocks and cliffs, fences with proper XML code output, flattening terrain where I want placeables and get the XML placeable code writen for me.. SO many possibilities@@j_rocknation

[@22antler]

I assume this is a fictional map. Can Houdini identify field boundaries, roads, or trees from a high resolution satellite map? I’m currently painting all these for a large map im making and it’s quite tedious

[@juku619]

Yeah would be a time saver definetly, i once spent 2 weeks painting the fields for a 4x map because i drew all the contours and washouts also

[@olahaldor]

Houdini can't, but you can help.
I just spent two nights creating roads and 275 fields in a 4x map, created foliage/ground texture masks and have it all in GE right now. It's basically "Done". Just need to add buildings and add details like fences and signs and such. But that's not my plate, a friend wanted this map and I offered to help, and at the same time refine the tools a little. Still room for improvement! :)

[@KingTheSlav]

What map is it?

[@olahaldor]

This is Elmscreek, one of the default maps in FS22 :) I used it just as an example to showcase this technique.