All Posts filed under “Free Tutorials

Interference Patterns On Surfaces

Interference Patterns On Surfaces

Today we’re revisiting an old setup of ours: Creating intricate interference patterns using circular waves. Time has passed since Mo built the first version of this in 2018 and now, with Houdini 19.5, we got a new node that finally allows us to calculate those […]

Vellum Folding

Paper Folding with Vellum

In this video Chris covers a simple way of simulating origami like patterns in Houdini and Vellum, just using edge groups and (depending on how you count them) three or six lines of vex. We can very much recommend watching Junichiro Horikawa’s previous explorations on […]

Vellum Belt Adjuster

Simulating a Belt Adjuster in Vellum

There are some setups that start out looking quite easy and then get harder the more you start thinking about them. And this belt adjuster is one of them because we got quite a few elements interacting with each other. As usual with Vellum, the […]

MyFirstLatentSpace

Building a Latent Space in Houdini: Part 1 – Theory

This week we want to give you a lot more insight into what a latent space actually is and how it gets created. In this case not by using Stable Diffusion, but by building and training our own neural net inside Houdini, who’s only job […]

Curling Ribbons

Simulating Curling Ribbons in Vellum

The idea for this video came from a question on our Patreon Community Hub, asking us how we’d go about creating curling ribbons in vellum, similar to a very beautiful setup by Playback Design. And, as it turns out, this is a quite fun and […]

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. […]

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 […]

Geometry Nodes Simulation: Relax Points

Often you’ll need point distributions with non-overlapping points. Be it that you want to pack scales onto the surface of a fish or distribute vegetation on your procedural terrain. Although the “distribute points on faces” node comes with a poisson disc mode to remove overlapping […]

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, […]

Geometry Nodes Simulation: Advect by Curl Noise

Simulation inside of Geometry Nodes is finally possible with this “buffer” hack. After setting up the sim environment, Manuel explains to you what the curl of a vector field is all about and implements a version of curl noise to drive some simulated particles. Download […]

Connect The Dots with Geometry Nodes, The “Plexus” Effect

This time we’ll create the “plexus” effect with Geometry Nodes inside of Blender. Manuel shows you how to abuse geometry to fake a loop, that tests all connections between the points of an incoming point cloud and compares their lengths. Then, only the ones are […]

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 […]

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

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 […]