This is a port of my Diamond-Square 3ds Max plugin to a Houdini SOP. See the original plugin's page for more details on the implementation (e.g. it wraps, it's iterative, etc.). This port is also MIT-licensed like the original.
To compile the SOP and install it to your local Houdini directories, run make install in the project directory from within the Houdini Shell environment. Note: the Makefile is configured to create a dylib for Mac OS X. If on Linux, change the Makefile to create a so; if on Windows, change the Makefile to create a dll.
To use the SOP, simply create an object in Houdini (such as a Box or a Sphere). Then go into the object and add the DiamondSquare SOP. Set the Display/Render flag on the new DiamondSquare SOP and delete the existing SOP.
- Configure randomness by setting the Seed parameter.
- Scale the terrain width/height/length by setting the Size parameter.
- Set the Roughness between 0 (none) and 1 (full). I suggest you limit this value to around 0.1 or 0.2.
- Set the Divisions parameter to change the number of iterations of the diamond-square algorithm. Note that this will exponentially increase the number of polygons in the terrain mesh.
- The Diamond-Square SOP will automatically add UV texture coordinates to its output geoemtry.
