Houdini: Baking Point Attributes To Textures

EDIT: For more point to texture attribute trickery have a look at the scene files. In our tutorial on dissolving geometry we hinted at baking point distances into a texture rather than using highly subdivided geometry to store attributes from a point cloud. While this […]

Axiom Solver: Dissolving Logo

In our tradition to being late to the party, we’re giving Matt Puchala’s Axiom solver a spin. It’s a lightweight and fast pyro solver for SideFX Houdini, enabling interactive workflows with smoke or fire simulations. In this video we’re gonna use it together with Houdini’s […]

Blender Geometry Nodes: Vertex Normals – Alien Orb

The development of Geometry Nodes inside of Blender does not slow down. Recently they added support for vertex normals on input meshes. Manu guides you through the stages required to build this space orb effect that relies on vertex normals. You’ll learn some procedural animation […]

Production Setup: Audioreactive Particles Using Vellum & POPs

You wanted to know how to set up something similar to Daniel Sierra’s “Oscillate” in Houdini. So in this tutorial we’ll walk you through the steps necessary to not only create an audioreactive Vellum simulation but also add secondary particles into that simulation and create […]

Dynamic Outlines with Blender Geometry Nodes and Eevee

Now that Blender features procedural workflows with its lates feature addition Geometry Nodes its time for us to have a look at the other side of the fence. This tutorial mini-series looks into GN from a Houdini users perspective and explores what’s already there and […]

Mograph Liquids: Controlling FLIP Fluids Via Curve Forces

Been going through a few of Jeff Wagner’s feature presentations from a the last few Houdini releases and stumbled upon a gem which I thought I’d base a setup on: Controlling FLIP fluids using a curve. Throw in a tiny bit of VDB/VEX magic and […]

Guest Tutorial: Simon Fiedler – Controlling Swirly Particles

It finally happened – our dear friend Simon Fiedler agreed to record a guest tutorial for us. He decided to share one of his production tricks for controlling particles: Building a swirly vector field to advect particles. Although it looks organic and natural, it’s highly […]

Morphing Point Portraits

You just want to distract yourself on twitter and you stumble upon this tweet by Daniel Piker. Naturally we had to give it a go in Houdini. And it turns out it can be done with surprisingly few nodes and without any sort of scripting… […]

Keycap Sculptures (Disco Ball Tiling)

When we received an E-Mail by Eduard, asking if we had any idea about disco ball packing, we were intrigued. Eduard pointed out that his (apparently very patient) wife manually tiled this sculpture and was wondering if there’s any way to automate it. He also […]

Bubbles Yet Again: Implementing Glassner’s Bubble Triplets in VEX

Bubbles. Again. How thrilling. Wait – before you leave hear me out: Building this setup was one major step for me towards becoming brave enough to tackle implementing my first computer graphics paper. Andrew Glassner wrote a fantastic article about how soap bubble triplets form […]

Holiday Giveaway: Mantra Thinfilm Shader

Happy Holidays! Turns out rendering spherical objects has become our very own tradition by now, so as an addon to Monday’s tut and the question “But can u do it in Mantra?” – Here’s a small present hastily thrown together by yours truly: A VEX […]

Bubbles Again: Simulating Soap Swirls Using FLIP

By now it might have become apparent that Mo might be a bit fixated with soap bubbles and soap films. We covered Minimal Surfaces, soap film shading in Octane and in Redshift. Yet we deliberately omitted one crucial step in rendering nice soap bubbles: Creating […]

Sloppy Unreal 03: Correcting Mistakes & Bevelling Legos

EDIT: Damn it, I think specular in UE and me are cursed. When I was testing this setup I had post processing exposure cranked up, which messed up my results. Turns out that specular expects a value between 0 and 1 which internally is remapped […]

Sloppy Unreal 01: Camera Controls Using Blueprints

Mo has been silent for a while. That’s due to him spending his days finishing projects and yelling at Unreal Engine. The goal is getting to a point where we’re comfortable bringing together Houdini workflows and UE. That road is long. To discover Unreal, the […]

Creating Procedural Welding Seams In Houdini

Been watching This Old Tony, Wintergatan and Stuff Made Here a lot in quarantine. And while the idea of having your own home shop and being able to weld is quite romantic, our reality is that neither do we posses the space nor the skills […]

Unreal Engine Blueprints – Pt.1: Introduction

Matthias Winckelmann promised he’d dive deeper into Unreal Engine. And sometimes we keep our promises. In this course, Matthias takes you through the basics to set up your very first project using blueprints, Unreal Engine’s node based scripting environment. Mix in a bit of physics […]

Meet Chris Kopic

Subscribers of our Patreon already noticed – we have a new face on board. Meet Chris Kopic, technical artist, educator and designer. Chris agreed to teaching an area of Houdini we neglected until now: PDG. His premium course already launched and we’re very much looking […]

New In Houdini 18.5 – KineFX

Full Playlist Here Revisiting an old technique Manu covered a while ago. But this time using H18.5’s new KineFX tools to make it a tiny bit less painful. Nevertheless Mo of course dives into VEX and a bit of linear algebra. Links Manu’s previous tut […]

New In Houdini 18.5

Full Playlist Here Houdini 18.5 is out! And here are the features that got us excited! Of course there’s much more. (SOP based rigging anyone?!) We had great joy in seeing that Karma has come a long way and that real time pyro sims in […]

Workshop: Unreal Engine Quickstart

Full playlist here. Super hyped to have Matthias Winckelmann on board! You might know him from “Rachael is not real” where he built an AI design influencer bot that posts daily renderings to instagram. Matthias has been using Unreal Engine in his personal design process […]

Exporting Alembics For Blender: A Few Hacks

EDIT: Thanks so much for the many comments & hints! Josh Rizzo on Twitter pointed out I’m missing a few import options when loading in the alembic. Here’s how to import animated attributes without a deforming/animated mesh:– Import Alembic– Check “Set Frame Range” and “Is Sequence” […]

Guest Tutorial: Path Solver

We’re thrilled to have Houdini artist supreme Vladyslav Lavrenov for a guest tutorial. And quite a hefty one! Vlad takes us through his reasoning and steps to build a path solver in Houdini to have seemingly random momevements on a grid form a coherent behaviour. […]