All posts by “Moritz”

A Bit Of VEX : Easy Caustics Generator

Last week we’ve been visited by our good friend Fritz “Frizz the Whizz” Kemmler – a most talented developer. And while pondering some other algorithms, we needed a bit of distraction. So we ended up throwing together this one: A very straightforward and not so […]

Papers Please – Graph Bundling Pt. 2: Building The Setup

Watch pt. 2 here. In part two of our tutorial on Kernel Density Estimation Graph Bundlig we’re implementing the setup and adapt it to create smooth animations. EDIT: It’s been brought to our attention that there is another neat graph bundling technique based off of […]

Papers Please – Graph Bundling Pt. 1: Theory

Watch pt. 1 here. Let’s spread a bit of joy and dive into VEX and Houdini-SOPs again to implement a really neat technique from a french/dutch paper covering graph bundling. While graph bundling is usually found in network analysis or geovisualization, we’re gonna adapt the […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 20: That’s All Folks!

That’s it for the first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes”. We’ll probably publish additional five minute tutorials in the future but for now it’s back to our default schedule: Bi-Weekly Free tut and premium courses on Patreon. Free Resources (Apart from Entagma): Matt Estela’s […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 15: Packed Primitives (Theory)

Let’s dive into our last bunch of videos in this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” with a seemingly dry topics: Packed Primitives / Instances. Although slightly technical, it’s a powerful concept that enables Houdini to work on massive scenes.

Houdini In Five Minutes 14: Rendering Grains In Redshift

After we’re done setting up our simulation, let’s render it! This time using Redshift, one of our favorite engines when it comes to working and rendering in Houdini. Yes it doesn’t come with Houdini. Yes it’s a third party addon. Yes it costs money. However […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 13: Setting Up Grains

With version 17, Houdini introduced a new simulation framework called vellum. It is based on position based dynamics and thus offers a relatively fast way to simulate a multitude of effects. In our case we’re gonna use it to set up a bunch of grains […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 12: Setting Up Particles

Houdini isn’t just a great tool for procedural geometry creation – it’s also the single most powerful particle system we’ve seen to this day. Plus: The particles are deeply integrated into Houdini’s functionality, so you can combine them with virtually any tool Houdini has to […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 11: The Foreach Loop

Ever wanted to take your meshes apart and work on their individual polygons? No? Doesn’t matter – here’s the foreach loop which allows you to do exactly that! Download Project File

Houdini In Five Minutes 09: For-Loops & Extrusions

Apart from attributes, loops and iterative techniques are maybe the most useful concept when building your procedural geometry inside Houdini. With very efficient node trees we can cook up pretty intricate effects. NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 08: Exporting To Alembic

A few words on how to get our animated geo out into other tools. And more importantly a few thoughts about helping yourself when stuck in Houdini. NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast render engine, so I decided […]

Houdini In Ten Minutes 07: Animating The Spheres

Let’s get things moving and build procedural animations using our scatter setup. And while we’re at it why not talk a bit about more or less clever ways to set this up… NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 04: Rendering It

What is geometry worth if we can’t generate an image out of it? Let’s do this by setting up Mantra, Houdini’s built in render engine. Download Project File

Houdini In Five Minutes 01: Houdini’s Structure

Skip to 02:05 if you’re tired of Mo’s semi-motivational ranting. Houdini 2020! We’ve seen it pop up often enough on our social media timelines. And to help you transition to this amazing tool, we’re creating these five minute(ish) tutorials to help you quickly graps the […]

Obstacle Avoidance: Flow Fields

A quick and easy method for guiding particles / agents / things around obstacles, using Attribute Blur and Measurement SOPs. Download Project File

Nerd Rant: Blender Hype

You Asked for it – there you have it: Two hobgoblinish nerds rambling on about computer graphics in general and Blender and the recent hype in particular. EDIT: “That 3D Format” whose name we couldn’t remember turns out to be gltF – thanks Vasilis!

Quicktip: Blender – Alt-Navigation

In this Quicktip Manu will share his settings for combining standard navigation in Blender’s viewport while keeping most other shortcuts untouched to be able to follow Blender tutorials using Blender style shortcuts.

New In Houdini 18

Houdini 18 has been released! While Manu is still busy wrapping his head around Solaris (tutorials covering his efforts are coming…), I had the absolute pleasure to comb through H18’s new features list and compile my list of neat new nodes I found. I grouped […]

Physarum Slime Mold

While Manu and I have been on season break, my twitter stream washed up these mesmerizing, beautiful videos. Turns out they are created by Sage Jenson, a genius digital artists. But not only do they create these fantastic pieces of art, they also go to […]

Summer’s Finally Here! (We’re Back)

Mo caught a cold, Manu is freezing, we’re both so pale our cameras have trouble finding a proper exposure – that’s right, it’s finally summer in Germany! Yes, it definitely took us longer than anticipated to get back and restart the free stream! We’ll be […]

Website Redesign: How To Use The New entagma.com

We finally FINALLY(!) got a redesign for entagma.com! Believe me it was a ride. We should maybe talk this through in a nerd rant. This video gives a quick overview of the site’s major new features. However be aware this is all pretty new and […]

Season 3 Finale: SeeYou in Summer!

Thanks so much for your feedback, support, links, questions, everything! You are amazing – we’re glad & proud to be part of this community! Wow – it’s been a long season! Time for us to recharge our batteries, read some papers, try failing less at […]

Season Finale: Procedural Subdivision Curves

Data Viz – ever tried creating a bunch of smoothly connecting lines manually? Me neither, that just seems too involved. Enter Houdini. But how do you create control vertices for those subdivision curves? In this tutorial we’ll roll our own little algorithm for creating control […]