Wood Generator

Do you hate sculpting? Well, I can't say I agree, but if you do, then this tool is for you!

About the project

In order to fuel the needs of environment artists, I decided to take on making a tool that would enhance the experience of making wood logs and wood planks by procedurally producing a low poly, high poly and ID map in the click of a button! With adjustable parameters, you can tailor it to your liking with options like added moss and scattered objects (e.g mushrooms), alongside a bunch of control over the general shape of the mesh and the level of detail in the displacement pipeline.

Date:

14 Jan 2026

Type of Art:

Project Details

This project was built out of a desire to deepen my knowledge in Houdini's workflow and develop a pipeline for myself that feels right and fluid. The main goal I had with the project was to create a tool that could be used inside of Maya to cut the time of asset creation down. To do so, whilst not overloading myself with too much at one time, I kept my scope to target a very simple but reusable asset like wooden planks and logs.

This tool challenged me to integrate my knowledge and solidify techniques I was fresh on, overall it was an amazing experience and the end result cuts modelling time to near zero! Straight to Substance Painter <3

Things I Did

My first step during the project was to lay out that foundation of how the system would be built. As I was using Houdini for this project, I had the benefit of being able to access a plethora of nodes alongside custom script to create whatever my heart desired in one software. So, to lay out the core concept, I created a video outlining it right here:

In order to make sure this tool provided genuine utility and wasn't just a learning experience, I added a lot of parameters to add customisability to the visuals of the wood, including moss, scattering for things like mushrooms, access to wood grain noise control, etc.