Procedural Isometric World-Building in Latest Houdini & Nuke Environment

Writter by Kitai - Twitter/X

Baptiste Vercier unveiled a new digital environment. Seamlessly blending technical precision with atmospheric storytelling, it's a CGI Beauty — a project built entirely in Houdini and Nuke, showcasing the artist’s evolving mastery of procedural workflows and cinematic composition.

In this latest piece, Vercier constructs a moody, desolate landscape, where light, volume, and subtle detail come together to evoke a sense of vastness and isolation. The environment is not just technically sharp — it’s emotionally calibrated, designed to sit somewhere between realism and abstraction.

Vercier highlighted in a Twitter/X reply saying the breakdown of the base of the terrain began as simple low-resolution geometry, layered with a series of height fields — “probably way too many nodes than needed,”.

This procedural approach allowed for a high degree of control over erosion, slope variation, and scattering, even if the node tree grew more complex than initially planned. The resulting terrain, while born from relatively modest geometry, gains its cinematic scale and texture through careful layering and iteration.

Baptiste Vercier also stated this via his ArtStation Profile.

"Environment project completed in the 3rd year at Creative Seeds."

"The original concept for this project was an artwork by Romain Lebouleux, but as usual, with a touch of Rogue One inspiration."

"The project took me over two months and was quite a technical challenge, as it was my first environment done using Guerilla Render, as well as my first time working on FX! The smoke simulations were definitely the most challenging aspect, particularly from an optimisation standpoint."

"I was able to reduce the render time from 6 hours per frame to around 1h30."

"A huge thanks to Jean-Michel Bihorel, my friends, and the people from the CG Lounge and the Scatter Master Race Discord server for their feedback and support!"

This is the original work by Romain Lebouleux via his ArtStation Profile.

Geothermal plant part 2

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