All posts by “Manuel”

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 […]

Geometry Nodes Ep02 – Working with Geometry

Now it’s time to get our hands dirty with Geometry Nodes. Let’s create our first procedural setup, that turns a triangulated model into an alien mesh structure. In this lesson you’ll learn how to use Geometry nodes to modify existing geometry and how to branch […]

Geometry Nodes Ep01 – Intro to Geometry Nodes

In this episode we’ll look into how geometry is stored inside of Blender, how polygons define the connectivity of vertices and how Geometry Nodes is just another modifier, but one that can be customized without limits. To follow the lessons you’ll need at least Blender […]

Geometry Nodes Ep00 – Overview

Blender rencently added a brand new procedural system to its feature set: Geometry Nodes. While being quite powerful it’s not necessarily easily accessible, especially if you are new to procedural workflows. So we decided to cover this system in depth with a new patreon course. […]

Pack Points inside Objects with Geometry Nodes

Geometry Nodes offer a node to distribute points on the surface of another object. But scattering points inside of the volume of a object is not as simple. In this tutorial Manuel explains how to build a Geometry Nodes setup that does just that. First […]

Render Houdini Particles with Blender CyclesX via Geometry Nodes

Transferring data between DCCs is a cumbersome but necessary task. Particles are not yet supported via nodes inside of Blender for example and usually come in from somewhere else. In this tutorial Manuel shows you how to create a surface flow particle effect inside of […]

Geometry Nodes 3.0 – Plant Growth with Fields

Now that Blender 3.0 is in beta it is time for a little more advanced setup. In this tutorial Manuel will build a multi-layered growth effect. Fully procedural plants are scattered on a procedural terrain and controlled by an effector empty. They all grow individually […]

Geometry Nodes 3.0 – Cube Grid with Fields

The Geometry Nodes Team decided to redo the architecture of Geometry Nodes for the Blender 3.0 release. Fortunately we can have a look at the new way of working immediately by using the 3.0 Alpha. This tutorial creates a similar effect as my older Cube […]

No VEX Houdini: Dual Surfaces, my favourite setup

A new tutorial in the No VEX Houdini series. Here Manu explains one of his all time favourite setups: Dual Surfaces. By calculating the dual graph to the initial delaunay mesh, the triangle mesh that is, we end up with a very interesting voronoi-style surface […]

TD Essentials: Create a Swept Phyllotaxis Operator in Houdini

Plant growth has a strong connection to mathematics. Especially the special phyllotactic distribution pattern shows up a lot in nature. Be it the head of a sunflower, a pinecone or a pineapple. The dense packing of seeds and other organs on the surface of these […]

Cube Grid – Use Color on Geometry Nodes Instances

Geometry Nodes inside of Blender is constantly updated and expanded on. Using the latest Blender 3.0 Alpha we can now transfer color to geometry generated through instances. This wasn’t possible before and opens a wide range of possibilities for creative expression in Blender. Follow Manuel […]

A Procedural Polka Dot Shader with Analytic Normals

Today we’ll build a procedural shader that produces a polka dot pattern. While this is quite informative, as we learn how to tile the uv space, the interesting part is creating the normal map. We want to use the implicit sphere equation to derive z […]

Create a Procedural Hatching Shader in Blender Cycles

Today Manu looks at another porcedural area of Blender, the shader editor. We build a procedural hatching shader that will come in handy for your next NPR project. You’ll learn about generating procedural lines and doing 3D shading yourself inside of the shader using the […]

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 […]

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 […]

Rendering Houdini Effects in Eevee

Since the release of Blender 2.8 people are looking into Eevee, their rasterisation real time render engine. Eevee is free and gives good and quick results, so why not bringing over effects from Houdini to render there. In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the […]

Analytical Foam

As position based simulation techniques are very fast theses days, it is possible to use them to confrom intersecting spheres to each other, to model foam. Nevertheless there are other possibilities, too.

Polyfolding – Part 1

This is the first part of a two part tutorial. Part two will be available soon. Polyfolding is an interesting effect where you split up an object to individual bands and make them curl up. It can be used to disintegrate an object or make […]

Implementing A Position Based Cloth Solver From Scratch

Position Based Dynamic effects are quite popular today as these provide us with fast, predictable and stable simulations. Houdini comes with PBDs packaged inside of the “Grains” node and with H17 with XPBD inside of the vellum solver. This video shows how to implement one […]