Arc de Triomphe
A Sketchfab photogrammetry scan was imported and refined in Houdini to eliminate noise and fill in missing regions. Lower arch geometry was remodeled from scratch, UV-mapped and additional texturing was then applied in Substance Painter.
Surroundings & Streetscape
Ground & Curbs
Curbs, asphalt pavers, and bollards were generated by instancing simple geometry along Houdini curves. Cobblestone displacement was handled at render time through a MaterialX shader driven by Megascans maps and procedural noise.
Street Props
The metro entrance stairway, shop façade, and lamp posts were modeled in Houdini’s Modeler; fences and railings were generated procedurally.
Vehicle models were imported (from BlenderKit and A23D) and converted to MaterialX shaders via the ODTools plugin.
Buildings & Interiors
Front Buildings
Base volumes were generated procedurally and then refined by hand; decorative modules were sourced from Sketchfab.
Interior Illusions
Room interiors were rendered externally in Blender with BlenderKit assets, then composited in Karma using Houdini’s Room Shader to simulate depth.
Vegetation & Foliage
Tree Generation
Ten species were produced using the Simple Tree Tools plugin and ninety instances were scattered throughout the scene
Branch-cutting volumes were applied to prevent mesh intersections, and major trunks/limbs were cached as full geometry while fine branches were cached as curves for instanced generation at render time.
Wind animation was driven by procedural animation in SOPs with distance-falloff controls. Leaf atlases were assembled in COPs from Megascans textures.
Sky & Lighting
An HDR sky was captured on iPhone (via HDREye) under overcast conditions and cleaned in Photoshop to remove distractions. The resulting panorama was applied to Houdini’s lighting setup to achieve soft, even illumination.