1: Import Real Landscapes into Unreal in under 30 minutes using Houdini and real world DTM data transcript

in this video my goal is to share what i think is the fastest way to get cinematic quality terrains inside of unreal engine in the fastest way without any sacrifices when it comes to quality of the end results uh my goal isn't to show the end-to-end kind of pipeline of making uh a massive outdoor environment in unreal um this is just going to be a very short focused tutorial on how i approach making uh real world or terrains that are based on real world data and it'll take you know for your first time doing it probably half an hour from start to finish to get in a terrain that is incredibly rich in detail and natural like this here and the the simple secret it's not really a secret there are lots of people doing this um but if you're new to terrains uh then the simple secret is that we actually don't make the terrain uh we just we're just using uh open source data from the real world so many countries have their hype maps freely available and since i'm british i'm going to be looking and using looking at and using the the uk lidar uh open source data so what i'm gonna do uh and if you wanna follow along then uh the first thing you should do is you should open up uh a blank by open up unreal um and i'm gonna make a new level uh i'm gonna create a new level from the time of day template which was introduced uh into unreal from either 4.25 or 4.26 and beyond and uh if you're in unreal five there's a similar template in there so uh yeah this is already got a lot of what we need to make a really high quality uh sort of large-scale uh outdoor terrain environment uh we've got volumetric clouds which helps sell that sense of scale uh you've got a sort of light that reacts to um if you hold ctrl l on the keyboard you can move the sun around like this and the time of day and the color of the light will change uh and you've already got a sky atmosphere in here which is going to kind of simulate the correct amount of rally scattering in the atmosphere that gives that distant objects that kind of blue tint when they're far away so these are these these this kind of takes the uh the burden off of the artist of having to convey that realistic sense of scale all you need to worry about doing is getting in the real data at the real size so that's what we're going to move on to now so just use your search engine and you can search if you're going to use the uk data you can just search uk lidar dtm like that and first thing that's going to come up is this lidar composite dtm one meter from 29 2019 data so this uk data it doesn't actually include wales or scotland although that some of their um data is available online elsewhere if you search for it you could also search us open lidar dtm and i i think i'm quite sure that there is uh plenty of uh of data from from the united states as well the research again so us open source height map lidar data with some kind of combination of these these search terms will eventually find take you to the uh to a place where you can sort of access the data and download it what you're looking for is uh the usgs uh usgs data in there you can you can search for that uh that height data but be be wary that uh you you've got to look at the resolution of the data you're downloading and if you want to create a really high quality terrain you're going to be looking for data that is uh is one meter per pixel like this and that is one meter per pixel uh in the x and that's what one meter uh sort of horizontally uh it doesn't it doesn't include the vertical axis in unreal that would be the the x and y and z being up so the z data is a it's it's 32 bit pixel uh depth image that you're going to get from this data source and that's uh that's contains enough data to to contain a really really high range of different height values so once you're on this page which i'll put in the description you just go to survey download and it's going to open up this map which is interactive and i'm not going to restore the state to where i was previously i'm just going to go in and navigate to somewhere that i think will contain interesting terrain and uh this can be like you know a little bit a little bit if you don't know what you're looking for it might be hard to to find a useful bit of terrain here so what i tend to do as well is i'll just open up google maps i'll change to satellite view it's got a nice 3d viewport i might actually zoom out first and let's go and sort of get to the right area of the of the uk first i think i want to go up sort of roughly like let's say let's say northumberland national park is going to have some interesting interesting elevation data i'm going to go back to the 3d view by just holding shift and then moving the mouse around and we're just looking for a nice sort of interesting shaped valley or river will mention i'm not too worried about this if i was doing an actual project i'd spend a lot more time location scouting and i think this is where you run into one of the major advantages of working this way rather than trying to do a procedural terrain which is that you you you really do have the opportunity to location scout um you don't have to imagine something and imagine that you know starting from a blank screen or a blank piece of paper can be really tricky it's like how do you differentiate your procedural mountains from another procedural mountains how do you get that sense of character that you want and and you completely sidestep that if you go out on location scout and our world is enormous you know it is absolutely huge and there's just this almost limitless number of unique sort of terrain formations that allow you to really go in and sort of settle on the look that you want for your project um we have some pretty fantastical terrains in the real world so i'd highly encourage that you you you do this it's sort of like working from the best reference you can imagine and don't feel bad about it either uh you know there's no there's no like um you might have the sense that it's not doing things properly if you if you if you don't take if you don't make the train yourself if you take this troop but you know in it's in essence it's all just about conveying your vision uh that your overarching goals unless you want to be uh specifically a procedural terrain artist in which case go ahead um but a terrain artist has a really difficult job because you're not just trying to make the terrain look natural you're not not we're not always anyway you're not just trying to make the train look natural uh and getting in some nice erosion which is you know sort of something that these tools are really good at doing your world machine uh houdini gaia world creator but there's all sorts of other kind of man-made erosion animal-made erosion which these softwares don't really account for and you have to go in yourself and add those manually or write your own procedural scripts to do it it's and and at the end of the day it it's still going to be some kind of combination of noises and impressions so abstract of what a real landscape looks like and you can get really really good at doing that but it takes a lot of skill and a lot of time to get to that level where you can create the kind of detail that exists in a real-world terrain to get all the history of the thousands of years of processes that have acted on it so sorry for the little spiel there but um you can as you can tell i feel quite strongly about this subject and that's because i've uh spent the last six years of my career largely working on terrain so at least terrain's played a large part in what i do for a living and uh i was mildly opposed to taking this route at first but um you know i guess all art is an imitation of nature in in some form and uh in the end i decided for me it was more important to uh to get the to to to kind of achieve the overall goal that i was setting out to accomplish rather than becoming one of the world's best uh terrain authors or designers okay so spiel over um i found the area that i want so i'm going to go into the air like this and have a look barrow barrow burn that's that's the nearest uh that's the nearest kind of town or settlement but also white burn shank and let's have a little zoom out there make sure we're oriented north okay so i can see northumberland national park and barrow burn actually comes up quite soon so i'm gonna hope that the same thing happens on this survey download i'm going to go up to roughly where northumberland is as you can tell my geography is not great because i'm going to have to constantly jump between the two i'm going to use this sort of point here as the guide and zoom in from there and hopefully we're going to find barrow burn and uh if not i'll have to look for another another kind of sign i think i may have to go for another sign trying to find another another not signed but you know sort of location is a sign it's a sign fox no okay so let's have a let's have a look on here see if we can see fox no okay that is taking me way way way out to the wrong place the uk there um so i'm going to close that down again and shill more what's the first thing that comes up we've got okay so it's actually a little bit across from that first one we've got these big major roads and it's sort of roughly in the middle so let's have a little look there again big major roads sort of roughly in the middle and alwinton alvin let's have a look oh there's alwinton sort of getting closer now barrow burn is up here somewhere i'm gonna find it barrow law okay that seems bearable there we go found barrow burn so now we're gonna go in a little bit closer again and just i need to find out that specific value that i was looking i really like the way this river snakes down through this valley here so i think we're gonna be able to see that exact river uh in fact i think that is just this river here and you can see okay great so you can see now that there's this grid uh with these with these uh sort of this key sort of telling you which tile it is nt uh eight one sc and the the area that i'm interested in um kind of comes down for these two tiles uh and to begin with i'm just gonna i'm just gonna get this first tile because uh it's the one of the most interest to me but i'm gonna get the data i'm gonna kind of prepare to get the data for each of these for each of these uh tiles around it just in case i decide i need them so in order to download the data i need to move my mouse up to the top right of the screen here and you can see there's this download this your data download your data drop down and i'm just going to click the polygon to draw you could also do a freehand but polygon works fine and i'm just going to left click left click left click and then double left click to complete the square and i'm going to hit get available tiles and it's going to take a moment because it's trying to find these nine tiles so each of these tiles essentially is a 5k uh resolution 32-bit image so it's quite quite big quite you know quite a lot of data and uh it's uh it's it's just going to take a while to sort of retrieve that from the database and uh what's going to come up initially is this lidar composite dsm and we don't want the dsm because that's a digital surface model uh this means it's going to contain anything that contributes to high elevation one view from abroad that could be buildings trees etc it might be useful for some applications but we're just interested in the in the raw dtm okay and we want the 2020 data because it's the most recent and we want it in one meter accuracy not all of the uk is covered uh in some places uh probably around military bases or in areas where they just haven't finished the scan uh it's it it's not online yet um but it may never be uh so we're just gonna hope we got lucky and we got these tiles the vast majority of england is is on here and i'm just going to go ahead what i'm interested in to begin with nt8 1se so i'm just going to find that nt81sc i'm going to click that to start the download it's going to download provided you've got a reasonably quick internet connection won't take too long so i'm just going to extract that i'm going to open the folder and you see you get all these things and uh the the the file that i'm particularly interested in you get a bunch of shape maps for use in software like um qgis or other gis mapping software but we're just going to use this tip and this is where i'm going to jump over to houdini so if you don't have houdini you can very easily get a hold of it get an apprentice download to sort of view this data in there um so i'm just going to go search houdini i'm going to go to the get i'm going to buy and once you're in here you see there's a free learning edition so one major caveat here is that the apprentice edition uh won't allow you to export any textures above uh 512x512 which will completely scupper this uh terrain workflow um i have an indie license uh which is not too expensive although if you're just getting out of um university or you're still studying it's probably quite a lot um hopefully your school if you are a student does have the houdini education license which is different to the apprentice license and that does allow you to export in high resolution if you're at a 3d school i would highly recommend and they don't have houdini then i would highly recommend pushing them to get houdini whether that's for pre-rendered where they probably already have it for vfx or if it's a game kind of games course where they may not have it then uh houdini's really made some massive leaps and bounds with regards to its game's workflows and i think it should be a major sort of topic at any uh games education course now so get on to your lectures if you don't have it so yeah if you want to just follow along with the houdini portion of this tutorial you can download the free version of houdini here uh if you want to be able to export your results then you will need to get the houdini indie license um so yeah sorry about that you don't have houdini this is a houdini tutorial i suppose so inside of houdini um if you're unfamiliar with it don't worry we're not going to have to do an awful lot with the interface so actually just to kind of push that point home a bit i'm just going to go and minimize all the bits of the interface that i don't need by just clicking that little black arrow bar for each of those and hopefully that already makes houdini seem a lot less intimidating i can even remove this here so we're basically just left with these three panels so this top right panel is the parameter interface which we will use this should be familiar to you if you come from 3ds max or mira or blender it's when you click on an object you have a bunch of properties you can change and in the bottom right down here we have the the empty network view which is where we do most of our work this is the 3d viewport okay so first things first i'm just going to click in the network view on the right over here i'm going to press tab that's going to bring up a little search dialog here and i'm going to you can also get to that by right clicking but i'm going to use tab most of the time i'm going to search geometry so right now we're in the object level which is like the kind of uh container for a bunch of different pieces of geometry but because we're just working on one height field here we're just going to work inside of this geometry container so most of the time if you're a modeler this is kind of how you will use houdini as a beginner and once in here i'm just going to type in hf file and that's going to bring up this height field file node so you can see i talked i wrote hf which is just a shorthand way of writing height field and we can search hf by itself to bring up all of the different operations you can do to work on a height field or you can just kind of manually find it in here but frankly i would encourage you to look through this for sure but when you're working um it's probably more useful just to try whack in a few terms that relate to what you want to do like i don't know so i want to reduce my model what i'm going to do i'll poly reduce um it's it's a great little search functionality there so now that i've opened up the uh i've loaded up this height field file node you can see it's created just this default uh default plane uh there's no information oh there is an information i never noticed that before of this butterfly um but we actually want to get that tiff which we downloaded so i'm going to go to uh go to downloads and i'm going to see if i can find that that folder that we just downloaded i've got a lot of stuff in here i really need to tidy it up a little bit i think it's this top one and yeah that's right because of the date so now i'm just going to double click that okay so that is unfortunate uh we've found a portion of the terrain which is actually missing so at this point i'm going to go to a do a bit of a cheat i'm going to go here's one i did earlier and i'm just going to get one of those other portions of terrain that i downloaded previously and you can see that when it loads in by default it's uh the elevation is uh is whack uh and it's not it it appears to be whack and actually the the elevation isn't the problem um coming from that uh that tiff that geotiff uh it's actually got the correct um kind of value to so that correlates to the actual altitude above sea level so we don't want to start scaling it um in the in the height axis here we want to leave the height scale at one and what you need to you essentially know or find out is that each of these tiles is five kilometers by five kilometers uh along you know from one end to the other so uh what we shouldn't do instead because houdini is just going to uh anticipate that it's one kilometer by default so you're just going to change that to 5000 and straight away that's going to give us the correct appearing terrain data and we can just take take a little moment to admire that terrain and how easily we got it without having to do any real work um it's it's it's incredibly crisp and it includes all of those kind of subtle details like the mariana doing river um little sort of animal trails and human-made paths that would just take so long to do if you were trying to do yourself and beyond not only that it's it contains sort of data relating to which side which side is facing north and south because the sun and heat would erode those faces differently and all of these things are things you would have to add by yourself if you were making the terrain by hand um it's important to note that unreal has some very specific requirements when it comes to trains or at least some considerations that you need to be aware of uh so one thing that i find myself referring to constantly is this landscape technical guide that epic uh released years ago and there's a couple of things that you can glean from this document which i encourage you read fully if you are going to be working with terrains a lot and the first one is the recommended landscape sizes so it's best if you you pick one of these and stick with it we can see that we've got 8k 4k 2k effectively with you know slightly different to texture map resolutions which would be a power of two and i know that i'm working with data that's 5k and it's five kilometers and i want to get as close to one meter of pixel as i possibly can i don't want to use the 8k map because that's uh just uh going to be a huge huge landscape that'll be horrible to work with in unreal so i'm going to make sure that i'm actually going to export this landscape in 4k resolution so that's the first thing we can glean from from that guide there and there's a couple of options um the previously mentioned height field resample node uh which will re-sample the input data if i click this little i you can see that it says 5k by 5k but this re-sample node can actually be a little bit unpredictable it's great when you're editing the terrain inside of houdini but i would recommend taking another route if you want to export a terrain to unreal which is we just create a new empty terrain an empty height field here and you can see that's a lot smaller by default so we're going to set the size of that to 5k by 5k as well i'm just going to quickly between them to verify that is in fact in the right place and the right size and now the division mode is by size and grid spacing 2. so if we click i here you can see the resolution is 2500 by 2500 which isn't what we want we want to just set the resolution so the way i'm going to do that is i'm going to go division mode i'm going to set by axis and i'm going to manually type in for every free which is the resolution that we can see that unreal supports and is one of the recommended landscape sizes i'm going to hit i again just to see that indeed is 403 by 4033 there so now that i've got these this kind of empty target terrain and this source file i'm going to use a node called heightfield project and i'm going to plug the output of the height field 1 into the green input pin of the height field project i'm going to plug the output of the height field file into the white pin here and i'm just going to go ahead and view the output of that straight away there it might be helpful to think of it as if it's rendering a 4k texture although that's not necessarily what's happening under the hood and you can see now we've got this 4k version of that same data um and it's it's pretty close you know it's it's losing a little bit of crispness we've got less than a meter per pixel now it's like maybe uh a pixel every meter and a half um but i think uh you know that's just a necessary trade-off we take here uh i would advise you as a starter or even someone who's used unreal after that do not go down the world composition route in unreal uh it's going to take a long time to get that set up and working effectively and it introduces a whole load of complexities and problems your your best bet even if you're making a large environment is just to stick to one terrain okay um that is something i would strongly advise you against is going down the world composition route especially if you're a beginner i would also advise you against doing an 8k resolution terrain um if you're making any kind of shipping products like uh like like a game um even if you're just working on a sort of pre-rendered cinematic having an 8k terrain with lots of different layers for sort of weight maps and things like how you texture it it's really going to chug and be horrible to work with and in most cases having faster iteration times far outweighs having the like double the the density of terrain data um but you know that's my that's my advice take it if you want so we've done this little high field project we've got our terrain it looks good if we want to take it into unreal so at the moment we don't really know how tall this terrain is apart from just eyeballing it so in order to scale it correctly in unreal uh we have to take into account two things firstly we have to actually know the height of this terrain and also ideally uh where the sort of lowest point is in terms of altitude like above sea level and secondly we have to know what unreal's default landscape height size is and that's where we end up referring back to the landscape technical guide and uh let's have a little zoom through here and you can see so to calculate a custom height requires the use of a ratio to convert your custom height value into the minus 256 to 256 range so the height range is a total of 512 units that is 512 meters tall so great you know you think okay if my mountain range is less than 512 meters in height from top to bottom that's going to be totally fine the problem is you're going to be pretty limited in the height of your mountains if they can't be cooler than 512 meters and it might work for the majority of large hills in the uk but if you actually want to put in any big mountains you're going to have to sort of scale the height of your terrain a bit and as expressed in the documentation to do that you're going to need to know the ratio that you're going to have to scale the imported terrain by uh when you bring it into unreal so just because this is a little point of confusion um this 512 meters uh assumes that zero uh in the texture is is zero so a value of zero is black is nothing and that's going to correspond to zero or in reality minus 256 units and a value of one is going to be 512 meters high so so if you export a grayscale map and it sort of looks correct then the tool and and it encompasses the full range of values from black to white then the tallest mountain you're ever going to get is going to be 512 meters and if you don't have a pure white value it's only ever going to be less than 512 meters okay now this is just a moment where we're just going to go and have a look back at that file that we got from uh that we got from the the internet and we're going to open it up just in photo viewer it's going to look a bit weird okay that's not the best example because that's the one missing some data so i'm going to go and find one of those other dtms here we go and we're going to open it up and despite a weird previous start you'll notice that it just looks white and this is because um the every value uh in this in this image is above one it's an hdr it's an hdr image okay so every value of above one uh this photo viewer doesn't know how to read that so it's all just going to be white it's clamped to one so we need to convert the output you know from houdini into an image format that is just zero to one it doesn't go above one it's not hdr which means we're going to have to do we're gonna have to export it as a 16 bit image not a 32-bit image so okay that was quite a lot of information without any demonstration so i'm going to now go through step-by-step the first thing we're going to look at is how do we find out the real height of this terrain so i'm going to type in hf remap i'm going to plug the output into this first pin on the left here and i'm going to change the crease to the remap and you're going to see nothing updated in the viewport and that's what we expect but with this remap selected you see if i'm on project we're going to have different parameters but if i click on the remap again it's going to bring up the parameters for the remap you can see that there's just a button called compute range and layer to remap height which is fine we're just going to hit this compute range button and we're going to change the output min to zero and the output max to one so that's how we're kind of compressing the image and you can see this input min and our input max that actually tells us the altitude so we can see that the lowest point of this terrain is 71 meters above sea level and the highest point is 851 so we're going to have to make a note of these values we're going to remember them we'll come back to them in a minute the next thing we're going to do is we're going to do hf out for a height field output node we're going to take the output of the remap and put it into the input of the output confusing terminology there um so we're just going to plug that in there and we don't need to actually focus this room up or the output we're just going to go back and focus the project so we can see the real terrain don't worry that it looks like a viewport that's not not relevant really so we're going to open up the we're going to drag a box around or select the output and we're going to see that right off the mark it's got a whole bunch of options for us to change we can set a file name we can press save to disk we can change the format the type and we can choose what channels to export and uh straight away i'm going to go and change it to single channel because we only want to export a single grayscale map for the height and then we're going to change the the type to a 16-bit fixed because that is the format that unreal likes we're going to go down to the image channel and in this red input this is just a single channel and it calls it red we're going to choose the height and you see here it's now created an additional drop down which allows us to do an auto remap or a manual remap and the reason i haven't gone with that route is because we actually wanted to see what the altitude of this train is so we can we can work out what the the conversion ratio is if we'd done an automatic remap we would have no visibility on what those height values were you could also do a manual remap but i just thought it would be helpful to break this into two separate steps okay you also have the option to set the tiling um so divided into tiled maps for something like world composition but uh just i'm going to reiterate i would advise you against going down that route if you're a beginner okay so now we need to set the file name for export but up to this point i haven't actually saved the project that i'm working in so i'm going to need to do that first i'm going to go up to file i'm going to hit save as and just going to find a location on disk that i want to i want to put this in i'm going to create a new folder here i'm going to call this workshops and i'm going to make a new folder here and i'm going to call this workshop one lidar terrain since this is my first youtube workshop and then i'm just going to call it as well the same as the folder name workshop 1 lidar terrain dot hit okay great this is where we're going to take advantage of uh some of uh houdini's relative kind of like commands and paths um so we could just go and find a location on this that we want to export to but that would require navigating and being organized and i like generally i generally like things to be organized without me having to always be organized myself and uh what i can do there is i can just type in dollar yep and that's going to look in the save directory of the project so we only need to set the location once right so here that's just it's useful to remember that dollar hit like that means look inside the directory the folder where the project file itself is saved okay now i'm going to type exports so it's going to create a subfolder called exports and i'm going to call this lidar height dot png because i want to export it in png format and i'm going to tag this as height in case i want to export any additional information for example layer information later in the same directory and with that all i need to do is hit save to disk it's going to take a moment to render this time it is actually rendering a texture a 4k texture on disk and i'm going to wait for that to finish now i could of course navigate through the folder through windows explorer to where i created the project and find the files there but that's just a really slow way of finding files and um the way i like to do it i'm just going to go to this file chooser i'm going to go up to look in and right click expand path control a control c to get all of that text i'm going to then open windows explorer and just paste that and that's going to take me straight to the to the folder where uh where i've output the images and we see we've got the lidar height there okay so we've got that on disk it's a roughly 4k image and the next step we're going to do is jump inside of unreal um actually one last comment if this is all black or all white it means that you've somewhere messed up either the bit depth of the image or the remapping um that we did so you need to make sure that the height field remap i'll go back to that is set to output min 0 and output max 1. okay so we've got this on disk i'm going to open up unreal and i'm going to just hit f11 there to jump out of that full screen preview and i'm going to use shift 2 on the keyboard to bring up the landscape mode if you press shift 1 that will put you back in your regular mode and shift three takes you to foliage shift call takes you to brush editing shift by mesh pane so i'm just gonna go back shift two to landscape and i'm gonna click import from file okay so i'm gonna just paste that path again that i copied earlier i'm gonna hit open and you can see we get this preview of the data before importing it um now this is an important thing to be aware of uh which is that unreal is going to assume that one pixel in your in input file correlates to one meter inside of unreal so the resolution is 4033 so it's going to assume that it's uh 4k by 4k uh plus like 33 meters now obviously the terrain itself that we we actually downloaded is 5k by 5k so we need to apply a conversion ratio uh in the x and y and it's very simple way to do this uh we just get calculator uh up and we type 5000 uh divided by 4033 you give see that gives us this horrible number um and we're just gonna have a quick look over in the x and y scale of landscape here and we can see it's not actually one one one it's one hundred one hundred one hundred so we just need to multiply that by a hundred to get the true scale so 123 uh point nine seven something something something uh and i'm just gonna i'm just gonna grab that by clicking on it ctrl a ctrl c and then i'm gonna paste that in here and it's automatically gonna update both the x and the y axis assuming that the landscape is is uh square by default square yes square okay so you might think this is the point to hit import but you would be wrong and that's because we haven't actually applied the ratio to the z axis yet so remember what i told you uh a scale of like one or in unreal's case 100 on the z axis is actually only ever going to go uh between zero minus 256 meters and positive 256 meters uh ergo we have 512 meters total height range for the landscape now if we go back into houdini and we look at the rematch we can see that we've actually got vastly different values it's going between 71 and 850 meters okay so uh what we need to do now is we go back to our trusty calculator and we do the very similar process to what we just did for the uh for the kind of x and y axis but we do it in the z axis uh what's the where's the clear button there's got to be a clear button in here hasn't there oh there we go cool okay so what i'm going to do here is i'm just going to copy the input max and i'm going to paste it and i'm going to press minus i'm going to get the input min and i'm going to paste it and hit enter and that gives us the actual height range of the landscape we're working with so 779.74 and now we're gonna do uh the same thing we did with the x and y axis um we know that the maximum height that unreal actually has by default in in uh is 512 meters so we're going to divide that value by 512 to give us the ratio between the two quick flick back to unreal shows us that z is by default 100 not one so we do need to finally multiply this by 100 and that gives us our z scale and paste that in there and you can see it just got offset a little bit more now this is the true scale of the landscape so i can go ahead and hit import and there you have it we have a one for one uh i just hit shift one to switch out of landscape editing mode uh and f11 to full screen it and you can see we now have the correct one to one scale landscape that we extracted from um from the uh yeah from google maps we have a little flip back to houdini see there it is in houdini have a little look inside of unreal and there it is in unreal we know that this is all geographically speaking um as close as you could probably hope to get a real terrain uh to being in unreal and that's the end of the workshop uh it's i hope that you can see that that doesn't require any particularly in any particular technical skills um beyond kind of um i suppose just downloading and getting a little bit familiar with how to use parameters and and the node graph in houdini um anyone i think should be able to get up and running and do this very quickly and benefit from all the glorious detail of a real world terrain in no time all right thanks for your time thanks for watching and good luck