All posts by “Manuel”

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 Reveal Effect in Blender Geometry Nodes using Linear Falloff

Although Geometry Nodes does not support simulation yet, we can still use it to create effects that look like particles. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to implement a linear falloff using the dot product to control a lot of instances procedurally, We’ll then use […]

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 […]

Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal

Dear Patrons, “Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal” is our next premium course. It addresses 3D artists that are proficient with another 3D tool and want to learn to use Houdini in companion to their main tool or exclusively. The course requires good general 3D knowledge, […]

Create and Simulate a Procedural Rope

Today we’ll create a procedural rope and simulate it using the grain solver. There are always many different ways to achieve stuff in Houdini. In this tutorial I chose the VEX route to generate the rope. This gives a nice self-contained node that can easily […]

Crochet – Blending between Delaunay and Voronoi

Here at Entagma we love to deal with yarns. This video extends the “yarn-effects” with a crochet approach. Using the delaunay triangulation of an input mesh and its dual diagram, the voronoi mesh, we build a procedural model that uses point color to blend smoothly […]

Nerd Rant: Render Engines

There are many render engines out there nowadays and it’s not easy to choose the right one. CPU or GPU, biased or unbiased. In this video we discuss the pros and cons of different render engines from our humble point of view. As a bonus […]

Nerd Rant: Hardware – DIY vs. Pre Built

This is an experimental post. As we often sit down to discuss different topics from our Entagma life, this time we just switched the camera on and created a vlog-type movie for you. Just the right thing to watch on a otherwise boring “no-new-tutorial Monday”. […]

Low Poly Transform

Blending smoothly between a high-poly mesh and its low-poly representation is a subtle but useful effect. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create two versions of the same object, one smooth and one facetted, with the exact same topology. This enables you to blend […]