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 […]

New In Houdini 19.5 Pt 4: SOP FLIP Fluids

One of the major milestones in Houdini 19.5 is the SOPification of FLIP fluids – allowing for a much more streamlined setup of fluid simulations. In this video Mo goes over the basics of the new workflow, including custom viscosity and density for our liquid. […]

Better Texture Tiling

Even if you have a perfect tilable texture with seamless borders you often run into problems when tiling the same texture often to cover large areas. If your texture happens to be irregular you might want to give this tiling trick a try to make […]

Procedurally Create Detroit Agate with a Karma Shader

If layers over layers of car paint accumulate in the factory over the years they create grey rocks with magic hidden inside. Once you start to cut and polish these rocks all the individual color layers are revealed and create a color explosion. In this […]

Procedural UV Unwrapping with Geometry Nodes

This tutorial uses Blender 3.3 Alpha. You can get this version from here: Download Experimental Builds Blender 3.3 Alpha adds nodes for procedural UV unwrapping. In this quick tip tutorial Manuel explains one way of using the new feature on some procedurally built rocks.

Noise Advection with Geometry Nodes

Advecting points through vector fields is often handy for different purposes. It can be used to visualize noise fields or vector volumes or just to create some beautiful abstracted graphics. Follow Manuel in this tutorial, while he hacks Geometry Nodes to make iterative advection along […]

Giving Birth Using Vellum

Sometimes we get the weirdest questions. And we’re quite thrilled about them! This time our friend Patrick (https://www.altshift.de/) approached us with a.. let’s call it special Vellum setup and some questions about how to make all Elements interact properly and animate them. Resulting in whatever […]

Demystifying Sevilla’s Parasols: Waffle Structures

At a recent Houdini meetup, Luc Morroni came up with quite an interesting tutorial topic: Procedural waffle structures, like the ones used in Sevilla’s Metropol Parasol. Seems easy enough at first I thought – but as always, the devil’s in the details. In this case […]

Demystifying Hamburg’s Concert Hall’s Acoustic Panels

Having visited Hamburg recently I was smitten by the city’s concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie. What looks quite minimalistic from afar turns out to be an incredibly detailed building. Of special interes to me were the acoustic panels within the main concert hall, developed by Yasuhisa […]

OFFF Special: My First Vellum Sim

Back from OFFF 2022 and well rested, we managed to upload our talk’s very quick example of how to build and export your very first Vellum cloth simulation in Houdini. Enjoy! Download Project File

Nerd Rant 2.0 – Ep.18: CG vs. Photography

Manu and Mo ramble on about what sets CG and photography apart and what might make them closer than they appear at first glance. Rethinking Photography (German): https://fotografieneudenken.de Chris Hoffmann / Ugly Stupid Honest: http://www.uglystupidhonest.com

Creating An Abstract Wire Sculpture

One of those classic setups again! This time we’re combining custom point advection with a few nifty techniques in Houdini to analyze how our base geometry is shaped and where its edges are. Also we’ll talk briefly about a basic rendering setup in Octane. Napoleon […]