This time a huge update. I’ve attached the hand to a torso I had modeled long time ago. The character should stand at the edge of a canyon. So I needed to research into how to get good terrain into blender.
Started with blocking out the scene and modeling a low poly version of the canyon:
Brought the low poly terrain into Houdini:
Utilized Houdini’s procedural tools to shape the terrain:
Houdini allows for creation of masks and other useful maps to scatter and shade objects. I wanted those to be usable in Blender. So I hacked the ply importer to not only import a single set of vertex colors, but also custom vertex colors. Additionally single channel vertex attributes of the ply will be imported as vertex groups, so I can use them for scattering objects like rocks. Here’s a link to the GitHub repository with the modified ply importer: https://github.com/FrankFirsching/blender-addons
Here’s the terrain in Blender with some vertex colors and vertex groups:
Utilizing the vertex groups to scatter cubes as stand-ins for rocks in specific areas:
And testing the terrain in the block-out:
