Creating runway textures with Houdini

I will be needing a lot of runway textures this year, so I built a simple Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) to help with the numbering.

HDAs are reusable components that can be used across multiple projects and are a useful tool for digital artists.

In the following video I have created a HDA that handles the placement and alignment of the specific characters found at the end of a runway. The complexity of the underlying system is hidden away and instead a limited interface is displayed allowing for straightforward numbering, positioning and padding adjustment.

Only the important parameters and attributes have been exposed, providing a clean and approachable interface.

This kind of abstraction means that mistakes are less likely to occur and that even a junior Houdini user could easily pick up the HDA and begin creating an unlimited number of runway textures with very little training.