Rendering Curves and Sprites
Learn how to render light weight primitives and curves within Houdini and how to create special shaders for them. And when we say "create a shader", we mean build a real curve shader used to fake textured tubes! Learn how to use sprite rendering and discover some tips and tricks about sprite rendering that are the core of the classic particle effects softwares or painting programs.



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Non-Photorealistic Rendering
Not only is this series of video the first one to cover l-system workflow in depth, but it's also the first one to teach you some real Non Photorealistic techniques (and by that, we do not mean how to find a built-in NPR shader in list, but how to really create non-realistic look!). For the first time, you will learn the workflow to render your trees as Monet or Cezanne painting, much like in the film "What Dreams may come" so that your painting gets animated!

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Procedural Painting
Even if our primary purpose is to paint some plants on any surface, we introduce you to a brand new field, that we can call "Procedural Painting", which means that you link all the procedural machinery of Houdini to painting events through the use of CHOPS (channel operators). Like advanced "script painting" without any code of course! You could use these ideas to procedurally paint or grow railways, streets, particle effects or whatever pops into your mind. This is a first step in the world of CHOP real time procedural animation.

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Painting Plants 
Push concepts of Painting Effects to the next level in Houdini. Learn how to interactively paint cluster of plants with parameters linked to pressure-sensitive devices such as Wacom tablets, like the number of generations of an l-system, or anything else! The interactive possibilities are endless. We give you workflow bricks to rapidly paint your vegetal landscape and ecosystem with some predefined plants (that you have created with the first video of course...)


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Growing Ivy on Ruins
Do you want to cover your ruin with some L-system ivy? Then just paint it! Learn how to use wire deformers to grow your L-systems on any surface ( which is not possible with standard L-system rules). You can imagine an invasion of evil plants creeping around your objects. Of course you can paint on several objects at once with our method.





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Nested L-systems
Nested l-systems is almost the ultimate workflow to deal with L-systems. The idea to plug l-systems one into the other has a lot of advantages:
It breaks down your "code" into easier L-system bricks and creates a more controllable workflow (which becomes much more visual and yet remains completely editable). You can plug predefined l-systems one into another and then reach a level of sophistication unattainable with standard l-systems, having hierarchical deformations, controlling tree silhouettes, growths, etc!


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The "Whomping Willow" Effect
In the end, we put everything we've learned so far to create a detailed whomping willow, with twisted branches, using several different techniques combined together. On this, and with Houdini's non-destructive and reusable workflow, we create a path for ivy to grow using the methodology developed in the "painting ivy" section.
This effect has been inspired from Harry Potter -like movies, or fairy tales with mysterious old forests.




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The Author
David Gary is 25 years old, french, and has a Bachelor Degree in Pure Mathematics, a Master Degree in Philosophy and is preparing his PhD in the interdisciplinary field of philosophy of mathematics, phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Aside of his studies, he's directed a dozen of short movies and video clips, being a director/video instructor. He began to be a strong CG specialist since a long time using various tools as 3dsmax, Maya, Houdini. He's been a Maya Teacher in a french studio and is now a advocate of Houdini and its procedural paradigm.

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