Houdini Labs Tree Generator > TAIAO

Last year I worked on a project for H4H and The Boston Museum of Science that required a pinyon pine to grow from seedling. My initial thought for that project was to use Taiao, the Cinema 4d tree generation plugin from Insydium that’s part of Fused. I had seen some examples they posted of tree growth and naively thought it was a one stop solution for the problem. What I hadn’t counted on was that tree growth is weird, hard, and no program has an out of the box solution to get it nailed.

The common issue I ran into was that the growth system was mainly driven by revealing the tree from the base of the trunk to the tips of the limbs like a trim paths function in After Effects. Since there are so many dependencies, this typically meant that the leaves at the very end of your branches aren’t revealed until the tree is completely grown. That meant that the sapling state of the tree was always bare of leaves until it was much older. For that project, I was able hack my way through the challenge until I ended up with something passable, but it was a nightmare. Taiao is great for a lot of things, but it definitely caused me more headaches that necessary.

SO, when a friend mentioned that she may have a project coming down the pipe that required another tree growth simulation my heart sank because I just didn’t want to deal with Taiao again. I spent a few weeks messing around with other options, but nothing would give me exactly what I wanted. This all just happened to time up with my dive into Houdini and it all finally clicked that if there wasn’t anything out of the box tool to do what I wanted, Houdini would let me build my own.

There were several tutorials that made this doable so I absolutely would not have been able to do this test without the following resources:

Procedural Growth with KineFX and Labs Tree Tools by Houdini.School
Time Offsetting in Houdini by Paul Esteves
KineFX 101 by Entagma