DIY Rendering Engine Like It’s 1975

What do you do when you need fast info passes rendered out but are too stupid to set up something in ROPs and too lazy to use Solaris? Right – you build yourself a 1970s render engine straight in SOPs. Clever? Not sure. Useful? Definitely. […]

Advanced Setups 23 – Controlling Stable Diffusion With Houdini

Of course Mo could take the high road and build a stable diffusion pipeline using Huggingface’s Diffusers library… But let’s not kid ourselves. Thanks to Automatic1111’s API Mo can duct tape together Houdini and WebUI to use both of these awe inspiring powerful tools to […]

Creating Escher Inspired Tiling Tesselations

Jeroen Claus happens “to know a particular kind of software that’s pretty good at applying a set of geometrical rules.” So he sets out to take you on a journey of building Escher inspired tesselations. Download Project Files (.hiplc)

Creating an AI Chimera Using Stable Diffusion

We continues poking into stable diffusion by giving a brief overview of what tokens and embeddings are and how the can be manipulated to blend between prompts. Finally we create some nonsensical animals. Huge thanks to Chris Hoffmann (ugly stupid honest) Notebook: Stable Diffusion Deep […]

Houdini Tutorial: Waddington Landscape

We are very excited to host our dear friend Dr. Jeroen Claus with a very special tutorial. He’s been working together with Tape Lab, UCL Cancer Research’s Cell Communication Laboratory, to visualise data from their study A Single-cell Perturbation Landscape of Colonic Stem Cell Polarisation, […]

Guest Course: Creating a Rolling Objects Solver – Part 1

View Full Course Here Please welcome our friend Bastian J. Schiffer who generously agreed not only to do a guest tutorial, but a full seven part course! In this begintermediate course, he is going to take you through the steps necessary to build a solver […]

Geometry Nodes Simulation: Relax Points

Often you’ll need point distributions with non-overlapping points. Be it that you want to pack scales onto the surface of a fish or distribute vegetation on your procedural terrain. Although the “distribute points on faces” node comes with a poisson disc mode to remove overlapping […]

Stable Diffusion 2.0 Quickstart

It’s come so far that even Mo couldn’t ignore AI any longer, so he reluctantly started diving into diffusion models. When he emerged a month later (and very unkempt) this is what he found out. This tutorial covers installing Stable Diffusion 2.0 using Automatic1111’s webUI, […]

Geometry Nodes Simulation: Advect by Curl Noise

Simulation inside of Geometry Nodes is finally possible with this “buffer” hack. After setting up the sim environment, Manuel explains to you what the curl of a vector field is all about and implements a version of curl noise to drive some simulated particles. Download […]

Connect The Dots with Geometry Nodes, The “Plexus” Effect

This time we’ll create the “plexus” effect with Geometry Nodes inside of Blender. Manuel shows you how to abuse geometry to fake a loop, that tests all connections between the points of an incoming point cloud and compares their lengths. Then, only the ones are […]

Quick Tip: Setting Up A Default Scene In Houdini

Mo is back from berlin where he spent a few days with Colors And The Kids One of the questions tackled there was how to set up a scene file that’d automatically load when Houdini started up. Turns out Houdini looks for a few script […]

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt.4: Excursion – Visualizing Lipid Membranes

Notes:– I’m recommending to stay away from refractive materials in rendering. This is due to the fact of this particular group of students having limited rendering resources. If however you have those resources, go wild! Mo had the pleasure of joining Dr. Jeroen Claus of […]

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt.3: Excursion – Visualizing Proteins

Notes:– It *could* be that 1 Houdini unit = 1 angstrom (which is 0.1 nm)– I’m recommending to stay away from refractive materials in rendering. This is due to the fact of this particular group of students having limited rendering resources. If however you have […]

Nerd Rant 2.0 Ep. 22: Manu’s Dad’s Paintings

While moving, Manu unearthed a part of his dad’s portfolio of oil and watercolor paintings. Mo and him discuss his father’s art style, marvel at some contemporary art and ramble on about growing up with a painter.

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt. 1 – Basic Lighting, Shading & Rendering

In this tutorial we’ll shade, light and render the geometry we created in our previous tutorial, inspired by Alex Valentina’s Work for Form Mag. We’ll be setting up a simple scene graph in solaris, import and light our geometry using an HDRI and then spend […]

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt. 0 – Creating Our Test Geometry

It’s finally time we talk about Karma again. Nope not your spiritual system, but Houdini 19.5’s built in new’ish rendering engine. It’s been making quite fast progress since the time it’s been released a few versions back, so in our opinion with KarmaXPU being in […]