All posts by “Moritz”

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]