Meander: a procedural system for generating maps of rivers that never existed | Hacker News Reader

Meander: a procedural system for generating maps of rivers that never existed

roberthodgin.com

267 pointshenning23 comments

Oh a post about Houdini, my favourite software!

Results looks amazing, though I wish algorithms were explained more in detail.

I think there are couple of more methods available for generating such rivers, approach taken by Guerilla Games is pretty good as well: https://www.sidefx.com/community/horizon-zero-dawn-guerrilla...

I started with Processing back in the 1.x days but I never made the transition to ‘professional’ tools. This really shows what an enormous difference there is between the two tools.

Why is it your favorite? I watched Houdini 17 and 18 sneak peeks and they are impressive, but I wouldn't be the first to be fooled by demos.

I do indie game development, Houdini extremely speeds up game development process by combining python programming, procedural generation, and conventional 3D asset modelling into one single software package.

It must’ve increased my productivity at least 5x fold, and it costed around 250 USD, which is really cheap compared to other 3D software packages.

Basically I just use Houdini to do everything from terrain generation, static mesh modelling, rigging/animation to VFX. It doesn’t have good sculpting capabilities, so zbrush is needed for organic character modelling.

Most amazing thing about Houdini is that it let’s you basically code entire asset generation and baking process via python.

I’m 100% sure Houdini will take over entire gaming industry, I doubt conventional modelling software like Maya or 3D Max will be utilised in new game studios, though older ones will still use them due to initial investments they made.

Hi! Thanks for your thoughts, they are really interesting. Do you have any examples of your Houdini to game content or could you recommend any good learning resources for using Houdini in this way?

I've been sharpening my blender skills for content creation and while I enjoy it, it's quite slow.

Game I’m making is still under wraps but for example: I got multiple building, door, control terminal, and signature variants all developed in Houdini. Doors have to open whenever a player within guest list comes near the door. Assume there are 100s of combinations you can make with these variants. I can just select the variants I want in Houdini, combine them within Houdini, click to a button I programmed in python that says bake and it will output a nice TOML file that automatically gets read by UE4 and I can just drop a blueprint that already exists within UE4 to world space and I’ll have my combined building show up on the planet literally immediately.

Honestly Houdini is so complicated it will probably take you three months to get to basic proficiency and you will need to learn python if needed. I mostly used YouTube tutorials and documentation itself.

Robert Hodgin used to go by flight404 back in the days of Flash. I remember seeing him speak at a Flash Forward conference at the Masonic Center in SF awhile ago. I believe he also helped develop the Cinder library for creative coding... cool to see this popup on HN :)

This whole website is an absolute gold mine. 1) It's like someone finally worked on all the ideas I've had, 2) it's absolutely gorgeous in every respect. Wow.

Forget the rivers, I love every single thing about this

Fun fact, Albert Einstein wrote a paper explaining why rivers form meanders and tea leaves accumulate in the center of a stirred cup.

http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/005/03/0105-0108

His son Hans is responsible for a whole body of work in river engineering.

https://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/news/life-and-pioneering-w...

Is it the maps that never existed, or the rivers that never existed? What does this title mean?

Author is creating a simulation of natural river meandering over time, and generating maps of that behavior in a style reminiscent of that used in a report by the US Army Corp of Engineers in 1944.

I think it's a play on recent "this X does not exist" trend.

https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/

Maybe "never existed" alludes to the time dimension used to generate these fictitious rivers; they don't exist now and they didn't exist in the past.

fyi, your “modified bitangent” is just the second derivative.

The second derivative of a circular arc points inwards, whereas the figure shows the "modified bitangent" pointing outwards. Maybe it's the negated second derivative, but without the exact formula it's hard to say.

This is really beautiful. Are prints available?

That's a lot of work, and a beautiful result. I'm just not sure what the purpose is.

I can't understand how you so monumentally miss the point. It's art.

Actually I wonder if it might be a significant contribution to the field of hydrology. For example, for use in floodplain modeling after landscaping, or water resources work.

Not really, since he's just trying to create a visually pleasing result and can ignore a lot of phenomena that would change the exact course of the river, like the water speed, water level, erosion resistance of different materials, slope of the terrain... (The example of a circular "river" meandering should be a pretty big hint that it's not physically accurate.)

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Very cool.

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