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 […]
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 […]
Continuing with our KarmaXPU quickstart, this video covers reading custom attributes into a MaterialX shader and using it to drive the look of our material’s subsurface scattering. Download Project File
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Mo is going to SIGGRAPH – and he’s running late. So this text admittedly is very brief. In this video we’re gonna (ab)use Houdini’s new shallow water solver to create this abstract streamline animation. Download Project File
Mo visited the Art Gallery of Ontario and got inspired. In This video he’s using Solaris, Karma XPU and MaterialX to shade and render the sculpture created in this tutorial. Download Project File
Mo visited the Art Gallery of Ontario and got inspired to test drive one of the hidden gems in Houdini 19.5 – Tangent Fields. Download Project File
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
Thrilled to have Jeroen Claus back for a quick tutorial on creating toon outlines as geometry in Houdini. Ideal for those hybrid renders between toon and photoreal shading. Download Project File (.zip)
Yes, we covered this in our “packing the Torus” tutorial, however back then we didn’t have Vellum! You draw the conclusions yourself! Seriously though, using vellum for rigid body intersection detection and resolution can be a neat trick when you’re depending on a unified simulation […]
In what might be our most useless Houdini tutorial to date, Mo covers exporting Houdini geometry for use in an embroidery machine. Yep that’s right. You’re welcome. Setting up Python for Houdini: https://youtu.be/aUdC8p17QEc Virtual Embroidery in Houdini: https://youtu.be/RgLcREpwaU4 Info on the .dst file format: https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Embro… […]
Part three of our special Nerd Rant with Vincent Schwenk is here! This time we focus on recreating a setup Mo once created for a project into which Vinz hired him. Vincent Schwenk is an incredibly talented Designer / Art Director based in Hamburg, Germany. […]
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 […]
Inspired by Maxim Zhestkov’s great artwork, we set up a simple Vellum grain sim and render the results using Octane render. Download Scene File (.zip)
Learn how to turn any object into molten lava by adapting one of Houdini’s presets to liquify any geometry. Ben Watt’s tutorial that triggered Mo to look into this. While we’re not talking about shading & rendering in here, we provide a scene file that’s […]
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 […]
We’ve been asked by Patrick how to pull off something like these beautiful paint smears in Houdini, so we got to work. Using basic FLIP techniques will get us quite far, we just have to find the right settings. (Haha. “just” finding the settings…) In […]
By a comment on one of our videos on YouTube we stumbled upon a strange behaviour in H19 which took us a few minutes to figure out. Turns out grouping expressions are evaluated slightly differently in Houdini 19. A single short forum post got us […]
In our last free tutorial we tied a ribbon into a knot, but what if you want (or need) to work on details like wrinkles or want to reshape parts of the knot? In this tutorial Mo covers one technique to arrange the detailed shape […]
That special season of the year is creeping ever closer and you might be starting to think about gift wrapping. One important aspect of which is the decorative ribbon that goes around it. Not that we’re particularly talented at arts and crafts, but we were […]
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 […]
It’s Halloween(ish). – so Mo decided he’d create something creepy. And this is as creepy as his mind gets. No judging. In this tutorial we’ll cover the creation off stress maps to drive the procedural generation of wrinkles using Houdini’s Karma XPU and MaterialX displacement. […]
Houdini 19 has been released and Mo is taking it for a test drive. As far as you can drive any software. (I mean a car’s firmware you’d definitely drive…) In this video, Mo demonstrates the new Vellum fluids by using them to create a […]
Houdini 19 has been released and Mo is taking it for a test drive. As far as you can drive any software. (I mean a car’s firmware you’d definitely drive…) In this video, Mo demonstrates the canonical example for one of the more popular image […]
Houdini 19 has been released and Mo is taking it for a test drive. As far as you can drive any software. (I mean a car’s firmware you’d definitely drive…) In this video, Mo modifies the abstracted sculpture we built in part one by using […]
Houdini 19 has been released and Mo is taking it for a test drive. As far as you can drive any software. (I mean a car’s firmware you’d definitely drive…) In this video, Mo builds an abstracted sculpture out of minimal surfaces by using H19’s […]
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 […]
Continuing our “No VEX Houdini” tutorials, Mo covers implementing a very clever technique to model organic surfaces using a mesh’s winding number, as presented in this thread on Twitter by Daniel Piker. In this quick (sub 10 min) tutorial, Mo will use one of Houdini’s […]
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 […]
Continuing our “No VEX Houdini” tutorials, Mo presents one of the first setups he built when he started using Houdini. He also rambles a bit about what Manu and Mo actually mean when they talk about using VFX tools for abstract design. In this quick […]
Houdini without using VEX? It is possible. Although Mo doesn’t enjoy it, he guides you through setting up a simple abstract mocap animation using nothing but built in SOPs. No scripting in this one. Promised. Of course everything is heavily inspired by Method Studio’s seminal […]
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 […]
Been pointed to Philipp Pavlov’s great spider web animation, felt in a mood to try setting it up using Vellum grains. Somehow succeeded. Recorded tutorial. Feeling cute. In this tutorial we’ll set up a simulation which allows us to tear a spider’s web. We’ll be […]
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 […]
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 […]
When stumbling upon Kumi Yamashita’s amazing artworks, we felt inspired to try our hand at the underlying technique of projecting shadows from a light source. In this tutorial we’ll be creating shapes and object arrangements that form a shadow image when hit with a single […]
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 […]
Super happy to have Phospho’s Jeroen Claus back to present one of his production setups, this time covering how to turn any geometry into an origami version of itself, inspired by the amazing work of Robby Kraft. Project Assets Download Project File
