All Posts filed under “Free Tutorials

Melting Complex Objects

Melting Complex Objects Part 1

You guys seem to like melting things! So over the next two free tutorials, we’re going to answer one of the more common questions: How to melt more complex objects with fine details, textures and multiple materials. All without melting your pc as well! Watch […]

OpenSubDiv Deformer

Sci Fi Panel Deformer with OpenSubDiv Patches

In this episode we’re using a little geometry processing trick to build a sci fi panel deformer, much like some of the tools in the Tissue addon for Blender. We’ll also learn how to use some of the OpenSubDiv functions within Vex in Houdini. Links […]

Differential Line Growth

Blender Guest Tutorial: Differential Line Growth

We are happy to bring you another Blender tutorial with the help of Louis Brodnig. He will show you how to create a differential line growth setup with Blender Geometry Nodes that he used in his short film about Emergence. Check out Louis work on […]

Freetut Particle Life

Particle Life in Houdini POPs

Particle Life is a new(ish), super popular autonomous agent system that is able to produce very organic, microorganism-like patterns with particles. So of course we had to build our own version in Houdini, right? In this video we’ll cover the basic ideas of Particle Life […]

Freetut H20 Clouds

New In Houdini 20: Cloud Workflow

Houdini 20 comes with a completely rebuilt cloud workflow, which makes it a whole lot easier to create a wide variety of realistic clouds. So let’s build one from scratch and take a look at the new cloud shape tools, noises and shaders! Download Project […]

New In Houdini 20: Feathers 03 – Simulating And Rendering

Houdini 20 is out and the literal poster child of this release is the new Feather workflow. And this really is a whole workflow, because it offers tools not only for creating feathers but also for creating a whole plumage, simming and rendering. So, let’s […]

New In Houdini 20: Feathers 02 – Grooming Feathers

Houdini 20 is out and the literal poster child of this release is the new Feather workflow. And this really is a whole workflow, because it offers tools not only for creating feathers but also for creating a whole plumage, simming and rendering. So, let’s […]

New In Houdini 20: Feathers 01 – Creating Feathers

Houdini 20 is out and the literal poster child of this release is the new Feather workflow. And this really is a whole workflow, because it offers tools not only for creating feathers but also for creating a whole plumage, simming and rendering. So, let’s […]

Guest Tutorial: Dart Throwing

We’re thrilled to have Andreas Catucci as a guest! Somehow aside from creating amazing work, he managed to record a video on a technique very dear to our hearts: Dart throwing. Sounds like simulating aerodynamics? Not quite. It’s a method to densely pack a surface […]

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. […]