Working with Point Clouds (Scatters) in Houdini

Guide to working with Point Clouds in Houdini for Assembly pipelines

What are point clouds?

In the Octane Standalone pipeline, point clouds act as scatter controllers - defining the position, rotation, and scale of instanced assets like trees, debris, lights, and more. Instead of baking geometry-heavy ORBX files, Andrey Lebrov's LMI Point Cloud Baker exports CSV files containing only transform data.

Why this matters:

• ORBX baking of scatter data duplicates geometry per instance → huge scene bloat.

• The LMI Point Cloud Baker:

  • Extracts transform data from Houdini point systems

  • Supports split-by-ID exports for multiple asset types (e.g., 5 tree species = 5 CSVs)

  • Delivers live-linked scatter nodes in Octane Standalone - update once, update everywhere

Use Cases:

• Animated forests

• Procedural cities using nested assemblies

• Layout replication with point cloud-driven asset connections

Bonus: These CSV scatter files can be refreshed and updated in Standalone anytime, to update your scatter simply re-export from Houdini and click refresh on the scatter node in Standalone

Assembly Resources

• Render Network Manager

• Octane Standalone

• Andrey Lebrov on YouTube

• LMI Tools Houdini

• LMI Tools Blender

• LMI Tools C4D