Terrain Simulation in Houdini and Gaea 2

︎ Last updated on 31/08/2025

Heightfields in Houdini are a powerful toolset for creating digital landscapes. Combined with Houdini’s abilities to basically simulate/manipulate whatever you want (if you know how — unlike me), there are ways to manipulate landscapes over time, creating timelapses of eroding mountains, which I find really interesting as it’s something that is not really possible to capture in real life.

Recently the developers of another tool, Gaea, released a new version 2.0 which is an amazing standalone software specifically for creating terrain with amazing detail. Along with that, parts of Gaea 2.0 are getting implemented into Houdini’s heightfield ecosystem by now, which is quite amazing in my opinion and is probably getting a good amount of attention throughout the VFX industry.

I’m trying to go over a basic approach on how to get working with heightfields + Gaea 2 nodes inside Houdini, working towards a simple moving mountainscape sequence. This process could definitely be done with native heightfields node and Houdini’s own erosion solver. I focus more on Gaea’s erosion solver which feels quite fast and predictable while easy to use. Potentially I’ll amend this post once I figure out a completely native way.

There are most definitely better ways to approach this, but as I haven’t found a huge amount on resources on this topic I’ve decided to document some of my own process bits.

Log Date — 30/08/2025
Tools — Houdini (20.5.x), Redshift (3.5.x), Gaea (2.0.x)